Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Some people expect me to have changed overnight because of one big song.
I was telling people like 'My Dawg' gon' be the song that get me out there. I knew it.
To own your song is very special. Now that I have a platform and so many people watching me, I have an upper hand.
People always tell me, when I want to get in the mood of a party or when I'm at a party and they put a Jay Sean song on I feel happy.
Once I release a song, it's not just about me or the people... I write about. They're my stories, but they're not really mine any more.
My guiding principle when writing with other people is that it's not worth it to give someone a song unless it hurts for me to give them that song.
'Santa Monica' was a big song, and I always knew it would be radio friendly. But it's not a defining song for me, though for a lot of people it is.
Many people think of me as a perfectionist, someone who polishes and shines each song and performance. I've always been bothered by that assumption.
Because, in opera, I have to sing for people that are very far from me, instead of, when I sing a song, I try to imagine to sing like in an ear of a child.
I do get a bit of a sense, just from e-mails some people send me, just a little sense of how people in different countries seem to respond differently to certain lines in a song.
I want to show everybody the diverse me and show people that I can do a tune on an R&B song, I can do a tune on a house song, I can do something on an Afrobeat. I really want to show that.
If you want to page me, It's OK! I've actually had guys tell me they were fans from the 'Kim Possible' days. And I've met people who still have the 'Kim Possible' theme song as their ringtone.
A lot of people really didn't expect for me to have a record with Kendrick, but I proved them wrong. It's not easy to get Kendrick on a record, so it was a huge deal for me to have him featured on the song.
The lyrics tend to fascinate people, but for me, when I listen to a record I don't always latch on to the lyrics. I listen to the whole thing and it may be five or six days before I even realize what the song's about.
Well, Neighbours wanted to do a song on the show, and they asked me what songs I had. I told them I'd just written this song, called Born to Try, and I had just gone overseas and spoken to some people from Song about it.
Writing has never been an intentional endeavor to me. I know a lot of people have experiences and then sit down and try to sort them out through song, but whenever I sit down to write, it comes out hackneyed or overly saccharine.
I was kind of known as a ballad singer. People would send ballads. Some of them would go over my shoulder and float off the top of my head, and I just didn't feel anything. Then I would hear a song that would absolutely shake me.
My most successful song was 'Language' and I think partly because it's a nice, dancey record, but I'll see people cry in the audience to that song, and that's so much more interesting to me than making someone just jump up and down.
It's always shocking to people, because sometimes when I go on the road and I DJ, they think I'm just gonna perform, so to see me really DJing and playing their favorite song and really rockin', it's a shock to people, and definitely to DJs.
You know, I always when people ask me, like, what is my most favorite song, I quote Duke Ellington, when they would ask him, what's his favorite composition? And I say, I haven't written it yet. Because, you know, there are different songs for different occasions.
Hawkwind are one of those bands that people introduce you to because you don't see them on the covers of magazines. I'd heard 'Silver Machine' but Russell Senior, who was in Pulp, got me into them. They had a song called 'Master Of The Universe' and we nicked the title in 1985 for one of our songs.
The song that's mostly changing my career or made the biggest impact on my career would be 'Catch Me Outside.' Mainly because it hit YouTube, and that was, like, my first-ever video, so people never really seen what I looked like or knew exactly what I was about, so that was, like, the first taste of what they got.