Most of the people in my family were pretty funny. Everyone had a good sense of humor. I came to California right after college, wanting to be a musician.
I never really had male influences in my life. Steady, male influences. And that's what I wanna be for my family. As a musician, I definitely will attain everything that I set out to. I work very hard. But more important to me is that my family is taken care of.
I know that I'm capable of moving around on the guitar. I can express myself the way I want to and feel good about it. But as far as technical chops, I'm not a learned musician.
Colorism and racism don't stop when you're a musician or when you have wealth or when you're in any given position.
I sought my father in the world of the black musician, because it contained wisdom, experience, sadness and loneliness. I was not ever interested in the music of boys. From my youngest years, I was interested in the music of men.
When I'm doing interviews, I'm doing interviews, and when I am writing, I'm writing. I sit there with a musician and I write. It's the same process since I started writing in my twenties. I like to come in and leave with a finished song.
It's much easier to have a diversified career as an electronic musician than it is as a drummer. Nothing against drummers. If you're a drummer, you just wait around for people to ask you to play drums. But if you have your own studio and can make music, you have the ability to approach music a lot differently.
It's really nice to be able to do what I'm doing without having to compromise with another musician.
I went to public school, and it shaped me as a musician.
I'm lazy. I don't practice enough. I do other stuff. I'm not a musician's musician, and I don't necessarily know if I want to be. When I hear something and want to work on it, then that's what my project will be.
I tried singing. I tried playing a musical instrument. I really wanted to be a musician, but I never could quite pull that off. I liked entertaining, but I was always drawn to some kind of technical work - some kind of honest labor.
I'd actually say that every musician is a human being, and that not everybody likes being social. But with music, there are all these ingredients to the business that have nothing to do with writing songs or playing an instrument.
I am not, and have no interest in being, a musician of any kind.
What motivates me is just to do a really, really good job at something. If I were a better musician, I probably would've ended up as one.
You don't want to make records so you can win a Grammy. You make records because you want to be a musician.
I hope America sees I am a goofy guy andI'm kind a crazy, I hope they see that I am a musician aswell, that I have music all around my body - I'm just exfoliating music, and I just hope America sees that.
I think that place is a huge part of pretty much any musician's work, in how one responds to an environment, whether it be your actual surroundings or the more figurative place we're all living in.
There are people from lots of different fields in my department. In my lab, they come from computer science, education, psychophysics, psychology, music - and we all work together, and it feels very comfortable. All the careers I've had have been interdisciplinary; working in a studio is like being an engineer and a musician and a therapist.
I still want to make Kyra proud of the person I am - father, husband, actor, musician.
As a musician myself, it annoys the hell out of me to watch an actor trying to play a guitar out of time with the music.
I don't have to compete in the charts. I can just be myself as a musician, a songwriter and play with the musicians that I really love.
I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.
I like to call myself a 360-degree artist. I'm a musician, but I have other things I do, too.
I think you could go back to any filmmaker or musician or artist, and look at what their input was in their formative years, and you could trace all the lines.
Growing up, I wanted to be a musician. My mother, in typical Filipino-mom fashion, would always make me go up in front of people at parties to sing. Back then, as a kid, I was mortified. In retrospect, I see that doing that as a child helped me get over my fear of being in front of people.
The problem was the journalists who also did not understand much of my music, but they wrote about it. I think you fell into the usual trap laid out by parts of the press and other writers: that the poor musician has always to fight the evil companies and managers.
Mendelssohn I consider the first musician of the day; I doff my hat to him as my superior. He plays with everything, especially with the grouping of the instruments in the orchestra, but with such ease, delicacy and art, with such mastery throughout.
The sexiest woman musician is Alicia Keys.
I never sought out a record deal. It caught me with my pants down. I was just a musician doing my thing, I didn't even send my records out.
There's no continuity in videos... you can jump around all over the place. In features, you can't throw in a close-up of a musician stomping on a guitar - you have to film a scene.
For me to call myself a musician, it's necessary to play live, and it rewards so much - not just in the pay cheque sense but what it does for my playing. I feel it through a tour - I feel it at the end of a tour - all that I've gathered, and especially now that I am improvising so much.
So I've tried to be this very eccentric character, and that works very well if you want to be a painter which I did once upon a time, if you want to be a musician which I did once upon a time. But if you want to make movies and you want to make challenging movies, you've got to be the sanest person in the room.
I'm a great believer that actors are very similar to session musicians. You wouldn't ask a session musician, 'How do you play jazz,' and then, 'How do you play classical?' They just do it, because if they don't do it, they don't eat.
'Some Kind Of Monster' is such a nightmare for any musician to watch because you're watching a band be honest to each other. Not a good idea, man!
There are so many things I want to do. Like, I want to get an artist, a musician, a photographer, and a bunch of dancers that I know and just travel across Africa and just film it and just see what happens. Do and learn as much as I possibly can. Luckily, I have a lot more time.
TLC has helped me to know that as a musician, I can talk about anything; that there are no barriers, and that you can be yourself. That's what I love about them. Left Eye in particular helped me to stay on top of my A game. She's one of the best female MCs that I've heard.
