Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When you grow up in the music industry, trying to be Britney Spears because that's what sells records and then you realize, 'All I have to do is be myself? I should have thought of that a long time ago,' it feels good to have success come from what's actually inside of you.
I was nurtured by Ralph Farquhar and then, later, by Sara Finney-Johnson and Vida Spears, two black women. So, I actually was nurtured by my culture, in a safe environment that allowed me to build my confidence. And Debbie Allen was one of my mentors, along with Stan Lathan.
When I sing along with Britney Spears I will sing in an American accent. But eventually I found my own voice. My songs are so brutally honest, it would be alien to sing in any accent other than my own. Don't get me wrong - I can imitate singers. I can do bar mitzvahs and weddings.
I did a cake for the 60th birthday of Elton John, for Britney Spears' 27th birthday and for the 'Circus' album she put out - the cake had circus themes. I prepared a cake for a surprise 82nd birthday event for the architect Frank Gehry; the cake was comprised of mini-replicas of his buildings.
I remember being in Atlantic City once when I was 18 or 19, and a sea of people were screaming and pulling their hair because I was there. It was weird. Nobody deserves adulation like that. I tried to explain it to my kids once. I said, 'Mommy used to be kind of cool, kind of like a Britney Spears.'
When I'm dealing with Britney Spears and Katy Perry, these massive brands, like, really, very Coca-Cola, you know what I mean? There are certain kinds of standards. There are risks you can take, and there's risks that you don't. And I think I'm interested in taking a little more risk in my own music.
I've worked with all sorts of random people - everybody from Metallica to Britney Spears to Ozzy Osbourne to Michael Jackson to the Beastie Boys. I've got a really strange CV. It's interesting - I work with a lot of these disparate, different people to learn what it's like to work with random people.
I think that if you know people who are performers on stage and actresses or whatever it may be, the bottom line is what you do on stage. You just take on a different persona - that's what makes her so successful. Lights come on, and suddenly, it's Britney Spears, and the lights go off, and she's just Britney.
When I was first starting out in the music industry, I was always coupled in the same sentence with Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera - and I was probably the worst of them. I think a lot of people back then thought, 'Mandy Moore... she'll probably go back to where she came from in a year.'
I do sing in the car. I actually sing Britney Spears songs in the car - me and a close friend of mine. She lives in West Palm and I live in Miami, and when we're going back and forth to see each other, we sing: 'Oh, Baby Baby.' We sing all these 1990s songs. We're like two 14-year-old kids just having a good time.
Going to the woods is going home, for I suppose we came from the woods originally. But in some of nature's forests, the adventurous traveler seems a feeble, unwelcome creature; wild beasts and the weather trying to kill him, the rank, tangled vegetation, armed with spears and stinging needles, barring his way and making life a hard struggle.
