Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I have come to Kolkata to make music, but I can't expect one director to give me work all the time.
I can't take a break from acting but I've learnt to work my way around films and devote time to my music career.
I wasn't letting people in with the music writing process, and for a long time, I thought I was hard to work with.
I listen to music all the time, and a lot of the things I cover are the standards of my time, and they work for me.
Records are just moments of achievement. They're like receipts for work done. Time goes on and people keep playing music.
Some people only work to recorded music because it's so reliable and exactly the same every time, which is exactly why I don't.
Any time I get a chance to work with artists that make me inspired and learn new stuff about music - every chance I get, I'll take.
If something bothers me, it bothers me for a long time until I find a way to work it out. Music provided me with a means of working things out.
Movies take a long time because movies take a long damn time to put work into. Whereas music, you don't have as much time. I didn't realize that.
Naturally, no one knows more about music than musicians. They talk about their own work all the time, but they rarely get to talk about other people's music.
I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.
I used to wake up before school when my mom was already at work. That's where I first heard a lot of music, like All Time Low, Fall Out Boy, Miley Cyrus, Linkin Park.
I'm constantly fighting with my manager to reduce the amount of time I have to spend on promotional activities, so I can get back in the studio and work on new music.
I'm a provincial. I live very much like a hermit: reading, listening to music, working in the cutting room, writing, commercial work - which doesn't take up that much time.
To have a body of work is a blessing - when you have songs that have been around generation after generation that they call timeless music, you can work that for a long time.
For me, the Internet's like music. I don't like working without it. I will tune it out for hours at a time, as I get lost in the work, but I'd know if it wasn't there. If that makes sense.
When the Domaine Musical started up, I wasn't part of it. They were the major players in contemporary music at that time, braodcasting old and new composers' work. And I wasn't one of them.
They were looking for actors - real actors - who could play instruments. There was a lot of improvisation and scene work involved in addition to the music. The auditions went on for a long time.
I was inspired by Solange's album, 'A Seat At The Table,' from the moment that I heard it. She has clearly taken the time to create a unique body of work and emote through her music from a true place.
For me, the work begins with a rough cut of the film. I can't do much with the script. I've tried to write music to a script prior to seeing the film, but I've found it turns out to be a waste of time.
Music was never just a hobby for me. I'd pick up a guitar every day to work on whatever I was writing at the time. I would put my ideas in songs the way some people might put them in diaries or journals.
Once I got to be about twenty-five, I got interested in the music of the time. I started smokin' dope, I started drinking, I started slowing down and trying to find myself. I didn't want to work in nightclubs.
I used to split my time between writing, music and painting. I would work on a book and then abandon it, start a band, do an album, quit music, then do a gallery show. Eventually I decided to give writing a serious shot.
I was at the Apollo Theater all the time, skipping school, and I worked in a barbershop. That's how I started with doo-wop. Now I've come full circle. I did all kinds of music. I used to work on Broadway and Tin Pan Alley.
I think there are some things I am unable to fully express with my visual work, and the music is what fills that void. At the same time, I don't think you can fully appreciate the music without the anchor of the visual work.
I started to write religious music at a time when it was absolutely impossible. The first religious work I wrote was the 'Psalms of David,' when I was still a student in 1957... At that time, religious music was really forbidden.
Music is designed to be listened to, so it's calling for attention all the time, syphoning off our very limited auditory bandwidth and elbowing aside our ability to listen to the voice in our head we need when we're doing mental work.
Together with a culture of work, there must be a culture of leisure as gratification. To put it another way: people who work must take the time to relax, to be with their families, to enjoy themselves, read, listen to music, play a sport.
Every time I see a film or TV show, I think about how that composer made those choices and how that director envisioned music and how that could work onstage or in a film and how you could support that even further by putting lyrics to it.
When I started getting so many haters and closed doors, I decided to prove that it could be done. I was a divorced single mother of three at the time and a size 12 - not your typical model artist that labels feel work for the music industry.
I listen to music all the time, and I just choose things I like, or things that I've not used before. Sometimes I work with music that's very difficult - that I don't even particularly like, per se, but that is really complex or interesting.
There's nothing I really wanted to record more than Bach. It's wonderful music. It's - on a grand scale, there's a lot to it. There are - I can work on it for a long time and keep discovering more things, you know, that surprise me every time.
I think of what I do for work as playing/jamming. Music for me is so much fun so I don't take my work very seriously in terms of not being humorous, but I take it absolutely seriously in terms of taking the time to make it as rich and glorious as possible.
In the '80s, I got tired of the rat race. It was a terrible time for music. I wasn't part of that whole MTV craze. I did 'Go Ahead and Rain,' which was Madeleine Stowe's first bit, but felt no connection to it. I went many years where I didn't have to work.
I'm always interested in seeing how other artists work. I want to know what their working patterns are. I even like to know if they listen to music when they draw or what time of day they draw, even materials they use, what they research, if they use photographs.
One of the main reasons why it didn't work out for me and Aftermath is because I felt my music should sound one way, and they felt it should sound another. But, I learned a lot from watching Dre, and when I left California, I knew it was time for me to get my own label.
It's insane that people have these Internet identities. It has very little to do with who we really are. As a writer, who I'm friends with, how I spend my time, what I look like, what I wear, what I eat, what kind of music I like - it's totally not important to the work.
I used to listen to a lot of music in my studio - all the time. But as far as the music that interplays with my work, what I've done and still do is keep a lyric book and song title. The material typically comes from Eartha Kitt, Betty Davis, Donna Summer, Whitney Houston.
It's important to me that my music stands out. 'Taki Taki' doesn't sound like anything else out there, and it's hard to do that when you are on the road all the time, but it's really important to me that how people feel about my work. It was the same with 'Magenta Riddim.'
I learned to play by ear before I learned music theory. For me, that makes sense. After all, children learn to speak before they read and write. The more you understand of music - how harmony and time signatures work, and what chords and inversions are - the more you'll enjoy it.
I think it's a shame when you come across young actors and musicians who haven't had the time to learn their craft. It doesn't matter if it's acting or music; you really have to learn how to do it from the bottom up because unless you have a great work ethic... fame is a terrible thing to have.
I don't work with Sia every day; it depends what we do, whether we do performances or music videos, so the schedule is weird, but when we're off, we always try to see each other in between. We just hang out; we went to brunch one time, but for the most part I go to her house, and we eat and watch TV.
Because I work so much, people think that I have a team writing for me, but that's not why I chose to write music for films. I chose to write music because I like to write music. So every single note that comes out of my studio is written by me, and I wouldn't be able to do two movies at the same time.
I had many, many mentors that I worked with. Music teachers, choir directors, directors in summer stock or in regional theater. You know, people I was able to work with repeatedly and learn from who were really sort of appropriate people for me to work with at a given time in my development as an actor.
I left Starbucks in 2015. When I was younger, I remember looking at Justin Bieber and wishing I had all these fans, but you know what? Everyone has their path, everyone's path is different, and this is where mine's going. I just didn't want to work at Starbucks. I wanted to be writing music all the time.
I used to work at this store called Music Plus in San Clemente, California, when I was growing up, and then they became Blockbuster Music, and, like, you had to get a haircut to work there, and at the time I had some pretty long hair. So after that policy was imposed, I knew that was going to be my last summer working there.
I really like the idea of modesty. By the time I got into music, I was already wearing the scarf all the time, and it's really personal to me, my Muslim beliefs, so I decided to keep it and find a way to work around it. I don't see it as a restriction or limitation - I can still be me and get into music and be an entertainer.
Youths write me and tell me that their band will go nowhere because of all the bad bands in the world. I tell them there has always been awful music and that no great band ever wasted any time complaining, they just got it done. Their ropey ranting is just a way to get out of the hard work of making music that will do some lasting damage.
Every time the mainstream media talk about progressive rock, they wheel out a clip of Rick Wakeman in a cape. For me, it's one of the most ambitious forms of music. The problem is that when it doesn't work, you end up with Emerson, Lake and Palmer doing symphonies with 60-piece orchestras and revolving pianos, which I think is ridiculous as well.