I feel like everything we do comes down to how it looks. Even no branding is branding. For example, you had no face or image to put to my music at first. That was branding.
My music has a very spiritual background, a sanctity that is almost like worship.
The day of the great jazz improviser who doesn't know how to read music is over.
I got into rock music at thirteen, listening to Van Halen, learned how to play the electric guitar.
I'm thinking in terms of a point of departure, a field of action for performers to express an expressive need of mine which hopefully the context of music would convey.
I connect music to the emotions that come from relationships, so most of the songs that I write are inspired by those circumstances, emotions, feelings, all that kind of stuff.
I always think it's important to choose your initial theme very carefully because you're going to be married to it for a long time. You might have to generate an hour's worth of music from a very short, little piece of theme.
I was sort of in denial about doing country for awhile but I sort of grew up and realized who I was, what I wanted to say. I think country music is the best music in the world and I'm glad to be doing a country album. I hope people will love it as much as I loved making it.
I've been designing since I was 8. I started sketching dresses I could wear when skating. I was always involved in all aspects of skating, not just the technique, the choreography, the music, but the visual aspects, too - what I should wear.
I mean, there's a hell of a lot of grounds for protest, but you don't do it through music.
I'm a huge music fan. I usually say that if I had been born with a musical inclination, it would've been great. The Beatles changed everything for me, and I wanted to be a journalist for 'Rolling Stone.' I'm a big music fan in a Cameron Crowe way, kind of in a spectator way.
Even people that know Johnny Cash's music really well and know that he was married don't really know that much about June Carter. So finding out about her really helped to inform my performance and to bring her to the front in a way that she has never been before.
I don't know if it's my music, my lyrics, my sound, and knowing the music business the way I do-all I can say is, my career has lasted way longer than I expected.
Then, when the Depression came, all of this changed completely. Since that time, the entire public is of a very different sort and there was not so much support for contemporary music in a direct way.
It may be that my most helpful contributions to music aren't my compact discs but my articles about other great singers of the past for American Heritage magazine.
There's a certain kind of idealism attached to 'Tusk' as a subtext to the music, and I think people now can respond not only to how colorful and experimental it is, but also why it was made.
Grime reminds me, if there is an echo, of sort of near enough like Liverpool in the very early Sixties. It's a lot of kids obsessed with music - obsessed with it.
Do not rely on unplanned music; it comes out as though it were planned, but planned by someone you cross the street to avoid.
Hip-hop is a beautiful thing. I think that the music genre itself has created more millionaires than any other music genre before it, especially in our community.
I've built a solid career there, but America's ten times the size. Now that we're onto the third record, I feel like the stars have aligned and American audiences are embracing my music even more.
However, in modern conceptual frameworks there is a more sophisticated view. I would say that the act of music exists in several worlds simultaneously.
I grew up listening to English music.
Music makes us want to live. You don't know how many times people have told me that they'd been down and depressed and just wanted to die. But then a special song caught their ear and that helped give them renewed strength. That's the power music has.
I have no musical talent at all. I was banned from music classes and told I would never be able to understand anything. I still don't think I can sing, but somehow I get away with it.
My access to music when I was growing up was through pirate radio, you know, transistor radio under the pillow, listening to one more and then 'just one more' until your favourite track comes on.
As a composer, I'm basically trying to represent myself through my music in an honest way.
I became inspired while I was listening to music on the radio. I felt the music in my head sounded better, so I turned off the radio and scribbled it down on a piece of paper. I remember that it was in May. People liked that song. They said it was beautiful. I felt overjoyed.
I'm more vocal about my ideas in person and music.
Music has to keep moving. But I was lucky. For me there was always something around the corner.
I think the thing about acting and making music is that it's easy to do both. I'll shoot a movie for three months, and then I won't have to work for however long I want to. So, I can do a movie for a couple of months and then come and do music for a couple. But whatever's hot at the moment is what I'll gravitate toward.
Growing up in a house where there was a lot of different musical influences - my mom listens to soul stuff and Top 40, my sisters would listen to hip-hop - and the church, I grew up listening to a lot of gospel stuff. So I think that plays a role in how I make music now because my music has a lot of range. I don't just do one thing.
I don't have very sophisticated taste in music. I listen to a lot of folk music. I like reggae.
I'm a huge stadium rock fan, but I'm also a fan of everything from Massive Attack to Peter Gabriel, U2, the Police, Radiohead, and Coldplay. I've realized that I love all forms of music and get excited when any artist goes crazy and creates something that is an experience.
My music is about my life. If it's something that I've lived, then it's something that I've written about.
Everything, I just wanted to be like my father. And, as I grew within the music, I kind of became myself which was even more like my father, only without me trying though.
I find most modern country virtually unlistenable. I can't relate to the music or the lyrics.
