You must learn to hush the demons that whisper, 'No one wants to read this. This has already been said. Your voice doesn't matter.' In the rare moments when the voices finally hush, you might hear the angels singing.

I think I will always be performing; I don't think I can take that away. Because I really just enjoy it. I like getting up to sing; I like the challenge of learning new material and singing it in front of an audience.

From the church I received a spiritual foundation that has kept me balanced. From the gospel music I learned the importance of singing with emotion- authentic emotion- not contrived- which has made my music endearing.

I get even more nervous singing when everyone's fallen silent, but I really try to communicate the meaning of the lyrics, and there's people there listening to that, and if they're moved by it, then I'm moved as well.

Being the Queen is not all about singing, and being a diva is not all about singing. It has much to do with your service to people. And your social contributions to your community and your civic contributions as well.

I felt that I really couldn't be creative with opera. You're supposed to sound this way here. You're supposed to crescendo here. You're supposed to do that. I had no sense of identity while singing that kind of music.

I'm definitely gonna do another solo record at some point. 'Flamingo' wasn't just me dipping my toes in the water. I really loved it. It was successful, and that helps, but I love those songs, and I miss singing them.

Dad always encouraged my singing, so when 'Don't Go Breaking My Heart' was a hit in the States, I flew my parents to New York first-class to see me, put them up at the Waldorf Astoria, then they sailed home on the QE2.

In Seesaw, I played Gittel Mosca, and because it was a musical, I loved it more because I was able to do anything. I was able to use all parts of me that I dont get to use... the comedy and the singing and the dancing.

If I were not a black artist but I was still singing, playing guitar, and singing ballads that are spiritual and cerebral, I'd be easier to market because people accept that from white female singer-songwriters faster.

Anyone who can do the splits and come back up on the backbeat, as James Brown and Prince can, has my eternal respect. Prince, who is a genius of the highest order, can come back up while singing and playing the guitar.

That has been everybody's challenge, above the dancing, the singing, the lines: getting into who these characters would be in 2015. Today's Tin Man is heartfelt, but he wouldn't be soft. Today's Dorothy would be sassy.

I'd stand on the side of the road when I was just a little girl singing on trash cans. People would roll down their windows saying, 'Isn't she cute'. I had a vivid imagination. I always pretended it was some big stage.

My father was a singer. So it just kind of happened that one Sunday while my dad was singing, I just walked out and stood next to him, and I started singing the song that he was leading, and I sang it in perfect pitch.

In my opinion, being an all-rounder is good. It is not right that I should be content with qawwali and ignore other forms, since I am basically trained in classical singing. We should be masters of all forms of singing.

You can alter movie singing so much because you go into the recording studio and, just technology for recording has gotten so good, you can hold out a note and they can combine a note from take 2 and a note from take 8.

All our life is like a day of celebration for us; we are convinced, in fact, that God is always everywhere. We work while singing, we sail while reciting hymns, we accomplish all other occupations of life while praying.

It's not hard to connect with the music on an emotional level and get inside the songs. It's odd, very vulnerable, and slightly embarrassing to be standing and singing and playing music in front of a bunch of strangers.

My father being a theatre person used to compose music for his plays. He noticed me singing one of his compositions at a young age and he was amazed. From then on, he taught me the little things that he knew about music.

By that point, I had started taking singing lessons. And after the first session, I mean, I was surprised that the windows didn't shatter. And after the third session, I really didn't know where this voice had come from.

I love singing! I was a musical theater girl in high school. We were always singing and dancing around, and just doing little community theaters and high school musicals. Then, when I got to NYU, I focused more on drama.

I didn't understand that I could sing until I was like 11 or 12. My mom heard me singing around the house and she said, What are you doing? You really can sing! So then I started going to school and singing to the girls.

Sometimes I forget that the label's been around so long that some of the bands they're singing now might be influenced by the first wave of Sub Pop bands. Is there anyone on that label that you look up to or borrow from?

I've said the line about Ray Charles a million times, but nobody listens to him singing "I Can't Stop Loving You" and wonders who Ray can't stop loving. They apply that to their own lives. That will happen with my songs.

I came up in Brooklyn singing doo-wop music from the time I was 13 to the time I was 20. That music served a purpose of keeping a lot of people out of trouble, and also it was a passport from one neighborhood to another.

Singing and acting suit me. I made a vow to myself, to do everything that I can do with this life that I have, and I have to find the time to do this. Sometimes I need to be an actress. Sometimes I don't need to be Jill.

In order to progress, radio need only go backward, to the time when singing commercials were not allowed on news reports, when there was no middle commercial on a news report, when radio was rather proud, alert and fast.

I can't say what my greatest strength between acting and singing is...I'll leave that to the critics. Maybe my best strength is performance itself, being with the audience and feeling what they feel, bouncing off of them.

When I would be on the stage singing, I would see a movie of something that happened, I would be telling the story. I would be describing the story in sound, but my goal would be to make somebody else run their own movie.

My favorite type of music to sing to would be rock and roll, Tenacious D, Led Zeppelin, some Queen - I love all of them. I love singing to them because they're all just great voices. I love listening to very obscure jazz.

I personally don't think you can love two things like dancing and singing the same exact amount. There is always one that you like more, and that is most likely the one that you're better at, because you try harder in it.

I loved being a soprano. It was one of my very favorite things in life, and thus far, and losing that voice was a profound emotional moment for me in my life. I never became that interested in my adult male singing voice.

I look for songs that the listener, when they hear it, they believe what I'm singing about, that I know what I'm singing about. That's my whole deal. I try to choose songs that a male or a female can perform and relate to.

I just wanted to perform. I just wanted to perform in whatever capacity, whether it was acting, singing, dancing, comedy - whatever it was, I just loved it and felt at my absolute happiest when I was performing for people.

I couldn't get away from the gramophone. It was the only thing that I ever really liked, and I was singing along by the time I was five years old - to the Modernaires and Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole.

I once saw my mother playing Mary Magdalene in a parish event. But she had to put the role aside in order to go and front the choir who were singing at the same occasion. She left the stage halfway through the Crucifixion.

What I miss today more than anything else - I don't go to church as much anymore - but that old-time religion, that old singing, that old praying which I love so much. That is the great strength of my being, of my writing.

In Las Vegas, a day before the Latin Grammys, I was walking backward and hit a light and fell down. The worst part is that I was singing with Becky G and Mau y Ricky - they all rushed over to help me. It was very dramatic.

I'm always doing things that scare me, because I feel like that's how you should live life. If I'm terrified - and I'm often terrified - then I should be doing that. Like trapeze class, or singing in front of 5,000 people.

It is hard to be unhappy in a gay bar where everyone's singing show tunes! In fact, I've spent many a night in those kind of places - in that particular place, actually - Marie's Crisis: it's truly a New York establishment.

With 'Fate's Right Hand,' I think I reached a level of completeness in forming and articulating ideas at around the same time I reached a place where I could match it with my singing voice. It was a kind of coming together.

"Everything must change, everything must stay the same." Those are good words to have circling around in my head. I just wish that I was able to deal with them, not by singing, but by helping myself. But singing helps, too.

My mother had been a country and western singer but when she moved out to Hollywood found it very difficult to get work so when I was born they put me into dance classes and singing classes as soon as I could walk actually.

The very first Walnut Whales recording was recorded just a few weeks after I had started singing, out of the blue, started singing. And the voice, you can hear how uncomfortable I am with it, and how terrified I am with it.

I think early on I avoided singing because it was so personal and I didn't know how to sit in that intimacy. I wrote songs when I was little and I wrote a journal, but I don't think I knew how to let that truth come out yet.

In high school, I started training, singing with choirs, and getting voice lessons and doing a lot of creative writing and decided that that's really what I wanted to pursue as a career, and that's what I was going to study.

Singing is an incredible expression and something that is important to me, but where I feel comfortable with how much I reveal about myself is acting. I enjoy the characters, the costumes, the wigs and just being a chameleon.

I've always written poetry but I didn't realise it was a therapy for me until I was maybe 15. That's when my singing started to come together as well because I was listening to so much jazz. What I love I will always embrace.

By the time Sonic Youth formed in 1981, my musical tastes had left the Dead behind, but I was always very proud of the fact that we had three different singers singing individually from different points of view, like the Dead.

During the 2012 Olympics, I decided to put on some cheesy pop because I knew Ellen White liked it. The first song was 'Reach for the Stars' by S Club 7, and before I knew it, everyone was singing it - suddenly it was our song.

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