Gospel music played a huge part of my life. I was too scared to audition for the choir, but through my own music, I was also able to find spirituality for myself.
Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.
I've been really enjoying writing articles and writing music and music for movies.
Folk is bare bones music.
I think the feelings in my music were suggested to me before I even had the ability to play music.
If you try to do that in pop music - to play only rare show tunes, for example - people don't come.
Its funny, because for females in general - not just in music, but the corporate ladder as well - anything we do has always been harder for us. When it comes to music, the industry wants you to conform, to look like this and to sound like this and do this or that. It makes it harder. It's harder for us to come out and be bosses and lead the pack.
First of all, the music that people call Latin or Spanish is really African. So Black people need to get the credit for that.
And so many of the kinds of labels you get stuck with don't really tell the story; Progressive, Art Rock, Noise Music, Downtown - it ends up being a struggle to stay out of debates that other people are having around you.
Growing up around British music, you realise how much depth there is to it... my stuff is different to the likes of Pitbull for that reason.
I love Florida Georgia Line. I love 'Round Here.' So if a fan wants to listen to that, and if a fan that wasn't listening to country music before is listening to 'Cruise' on Pandora, and after that a song by George Jones comes on, they may have never heard George Jones before. I think it's a good thing for the genre.
I've always had a fascination with making your own music but never have been skilled enough to play the instrument, so to be able to make music without the ability was awesome.
My songwriting and my style became more complex as I listened, learned, borrowed and stole and put my music together.
In cities like New York and Austin, there's much more of a social context for music than in other places.
The song 'Take This Job and Shove It' spent 18 weeks on the country charts in 1977. 1970s country music fans had a clearer understanding of the ennui of wage-slavery than modern elites.
Donald had reached its further edge, and could hear the rush of the stream from the deep obscurity of the abyss below, when there rose from the opposite side a strain of the most delightful music he had ever heard.
I'm amazed by the ground that I covered. The music's the number-one thing. And if it isn't, you better quit now.
So I came home and I had a resume and everything, but the only job experience I had was just playing in bars and clubs on my summers off. So, I was temping and stuff during the day and playing music at night.
I don't think you need a record deal to write songs. You don't need any other reason than you want to do it. It's a far cry from why some people do music today. They make it to order, which is pretty horrible.
If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that... I believe in what I do, and I'll say it.
I've noticed a lot of younger artists have less fear of doing different sorts of things, whether it's various types of music, or gallery artists moving between video and sculpture and drawing.
I've never intended to be controversial, but it's very easy to be controversial in pop music because nobody ever is.
The kids I talk to are convinced their generation will make the best music. And the greatest artists have yet to be discovered. I walk around with that thought every day.
If you look back, Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven were mixing music and humor all the time.
But what you realise after you've been in the business for a while is that people develop opinions about you that don't have anything to do with your music, they like or dislike you for a million reasons, they like or dislike you for your last record.
I liked that music was a window into a world with a lot of unpredictability and chaos; it was almost diametrically opposed to my very regimented day-to-day living.
It's the clothes that influence the music I'm going to play.
Spin Me Round was number one all over the world, everywhere. It changed the face of pop music, no question. We took technology further than Trevor Horn.
I'm overly excited to finally announce this amazing global partnership deal back home with EMI Music. I know I have mentioned doing music in the past but for legal reasons I was not in a position to release any new music.
While not a musician, my father was a music agent for years before becoming pop culture icon Famous Amos.
I've always been that way. I'm not very good at reading music but I'm pretty quick at picking things up.
Every significant event that takes place in our lives is set to some kind of music.
I always judge my happiness by how much I listen to music.
I spent a lot of time in Tower Records. I'm a huge music nerd, and Tower was instrumental to me when I was growing up.
When state funding for Irvine public schools began to diminish some time ago, my Irvine Company colleagues helped me to provide private funding support for continuation of basic science, art and music programs that had been eliminated by lack of state funding.
I sat out a few years because I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do next. So many things were changing in music and in culture, so it seemed like a good time to step back.
