When I was a young student, I only listened to foreign music, mainly rock music and hard rock. Then I surprised myself by discovering ethnic music. Now I like to listen to music from different places, and in many situations. Even when you work, some ethnic music calms the nerves.
Film music has a great history of composers and performers.
People would always ask me how I came up with my music and what it felt like to make music, and I would always see colours, and then I found out that that was synaesthesia. It helps me understand songs and what I like.
Whenever people get to see you, it's a great thing. Once people see an image and see the character, they can get into the music a lot more.
My mother wasn't rich, and I never seen my father. I was a street performer. I've been shot. And now I'm known around the world, and I've touched a lot of people with my music. That's one of the great testimonies that's gonna go down in history.
There wasn't really a song or artist that made me want to be a singer, I think I was always a fan of country music.
We never considered ourselves to be a good band or anything, we just thought we were playing for fun and we wanted to play music that sounded like Black Sabbath or Soundgarden or the music we were into at that time.
I didn't have any singing background. Against the wishes of my parents, I got into making music.
In theater and dance, I was trying to win someone's approval, trying to get in, trying to be good. It felt out of my control, whereas music suddenly felt like this free expression. It was fun.
Growing up, people are like, 'Mary, we'll see you at the Grammys.' You're like, 'I'll be at the Grammys.' Then, you're actually at the Grammys! That actually is happening; it's not just something people are saying because they like your music. It's real!
I suppose, counting back, if the Beatles had been influenced by music in the same length of time ago - you'd have to put that into better English for me, thank you - they would have been like a banjo orchestra. They would have been doing show tunes.
Music's staying power is a function of how timeless the lyrics, song and production are.
I still listen to a lot of the classics from Bob Dylan and John Martin, but I love electronic music as well. I'm a big fan of an Australian DJ and producer called Flume, who I think is incredible. He should be more successful in the U.K.!
I am a politically motivated person, and that will come through in the music. I'm not sure if every song will be 'Take Me to Church,' but I can only hope that people enjoy the body of work that I have ahead of me.
My music is about the journey, about love and the human experience.
I don't know if music has ever achieved anything past appealing to the people that it appeals to. If a song could stop a war, then Bob Marley and Bob Dylan songs would have stopped one or two.
Truth be told, I'm not all that comfortable with celebrity culture. That was always something that baffled me, the obsession over fame. I don't think that's a reason why anyone should get into making music.
I hate the term 'emo.' It turned into this genre of music, when all music, if you connect with it, is emotional.
Everything in my life has been about sound and making music, so Beats represents just that - the improvement of sound and the dedication to everything I've been doing from the day I started.
I thought that I wrote songs and wrote music, and that was sort of what I thought I was best at doing. And because nobody else was ever doing my songs, I felt - you know, I had to go out and do them.
Like all tools, modern technology has produced some wonderful moments in music and also some horrors.
I prefer black music in general.
Me and my mom made a deal that if something would happen to help me get my start in music, I could get out of college.
No, writing musicals is the hardest thing in the world. And it was really funny, because I remember when the South Park movie came out, there were some critics that said, 'Well it's obvious that in order to get it to be 90 minutes they filled some time with music.'
When playing big festivals, I tend to play big, over the top techno tracks, like hands in the air songs that make sense being played in front of 30,000 people. I steer away from subtlety in the interests of big bombastic dance music.
As a songwriter, pop music really is a love and a joy and a science, and I feel like a lot of people look at pop music with a very formulaic perspective in numbers and patterns, but an outsider would think that the process is very natural.
You grow up listening to Eminem; your parents don't let you listen to it - you gotta sneak into a car to listen to this guy rap. He changed my whole life, my whole perspective on music, so to more or less co-sign something that I've done is the ultimate childhood goal.
I've never missed a gig yet. Music makes people happy, and that's why I go on doing it - I like to see everybody smile.
I don't need anybody to market or promote me. If people don't want to hear this music, then it's not for them. You cannot please everybody.
Music is an extraordinary vehicle for expressing emotion - very powerful emotions. That's what draws millions of people towards it. And, um, I found myself always going for these darker places and - people identify with that.
The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don't set out to say anything very important.
To me, this degree was an acknowledgment of my work in music.
Country Music is great music because it really comes from real life experiences. It is such a great haven for reality.
Sports without music, it's nothing but a game. Music adds the emotion.
People dance and we have a lot of music and... this might be the closet I get for a while.
I started in a research lab for TV cameras, then I worked at a tape duplication facility. That was the first introduction for me to recorded music and hi-fi.
