Really the only thing holding a lot of records together is the personality of the singer, and the will to write all of these different things.
I'm not as good a singer as I am an actor. So that's why I - the stories I like so much is because I've been a story teller for a long time. I started as a singer and found out I didn't have a very good voice. That's the reason I went into acting.
The thing is: in order to reach an agreement, to reach that balance, sometimes it is sort of like that old Rhinestone Cowboy lyric, 'There'll be a load of compromisin' on the road to my horizon.' For those of you who were too young, or don't recall the song, made famous by country singer Glen Campbell, it is your loss.
I sing, but I don't think of myself as a singer.
I get good references from a wide range of music. Something who's been a good influence in the last few years is Qawwali music. If you listen to a Qawwali singer like Aziz Mian - he's like James Brown. Qawwali is like Pakistani gospel-jazz. It's emotional, but it's also improvised, and it's all about that sacred-and-profane tightrope.
When I was very young I wanted to be a professional horseback rider. Then I wanted to be a pop singer. Then I wanted to be a psychiatrist. Then I wanted to be a movie director.
I don't think I'm a singer, I think I'm an expressionist. But it takes time to put it in people's minds that this guy is not singing, 'Baby, I want to have you.' This guy is actually thinking about what he's saying. This guy has something to say.
I would spend hours absorbing every intonation, every inflection - how the singer would convey a sentiment and how it would sound coming out of their head. All of those things I very carefully watched and absorbed, and so I guess I was studying my whole life, although not in any sort of conventional way.
If you're a singer, you do concerts, and you get that interaction with fans and see what cities in what part of the world come out to see you. When you're on television, you're removed from that.
I learned so many roles so quickly as a young singer, I thought it was time to come back to them and make them better - deeper, more nuanced.
My son is in a band, and he's a singer, and his vocals... they're screaming-growling stuff... and he's got a pretty reasonable voice. Yet he practices really hard to get the screaming-growling thing without losing that voice every five minutes. So I'm, like, 'Hats off to you.'
It was really fun. Well, Bobby was just basically a folk singer. He didn't play with any bands or anything, like all the rest of us. Just played his guitar and sang his songs.
I knew I didn't have the right name for a singer. Having a name that nobody could pronounce was hardly an asset.
Judy Garland was a different type of entertainer. She was a dancer, a singer, and an incurable romantic.
The stuff that I dig, it's usually got a soulful component to it. A singer that I really like. I might not understand the language that they're singing in, but I'm really communing with this person.
It's every singer's dream to get to Carnegie Hall.
I was fanatically ambitious. All I ever wanted was to be a star. I didn't want to be a singer. I didn't want to be an actress. I wanted to be a star.
I wasn't actually trained by my mother, she said she never taught me but she was a great singer herself and I can't remember when I didn't listen to her sing and imitate her.
You can't do opera when already from the 10th row you can only see little dolls on the stage. In such an enormous space you can't put much faith in the personal presence of the individual singer, which is reflected in facial expressions, among other things.
As a singer I tried on all these hats, these voices, these clothes, and eventually out came me.
I like the bad-boy types. Generally the guy I'm attracted to is the guy in the club with all the tattoos and nail polish. He's usually the lead singer in a punk band and plays guitar. But my serious boyfriends are relatively clean-cut, nice guys. So it's strange.
I'm a car singer, in fact sometimes I pretend to take my dog out for a walk, and I'll just drive him around and start singin'.
But I have never wanted to be a singer, because the exterior part of a career, I don't like very much.
I'm not a very typical singer.
My mother had been a country and western singer but when she moved out to Hollywood found it very difficult to get work so when I was born they put me into dance classes and singing classes as soon as I could walk actually.
It's easy for a singer to sometimes pick up on another singer's sound, but that's just copying.
I didn't want to just be another girl singer. I wanted there to be something that set me apart.
Rap ain't out there for everybody; everybody can't be a rapper. Everybody can't be a singer; anybody can't just be a songwriter, but it may - there's some profession out there you can be in.
My mother is a singer, still performs today; she's a jazz singer.
I've often cringed when I heard myself described as a jazz singer. I've always thought of myself as a jazz vocalist.
I didn't say I wasn't gonna do rockabilly. I just said I ain't gonna sing no song that ain't a country song. I won't be known as anything but a country singer.
I think my great-grandpa was an opera singer or something.
When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me.
Whenever anyone asked me what I'd do if I wasn't a singer, I'd say, 'Oh, I'd have a cooking show.'
I'm not a great lover of Madonna's voice. She's done very well with what she's got, and I'm sure my voice turns her right off, but she's not my favourite singer.
I was more of a light opera singer, not really much of a lounge singer.
