The voice muscle doesn't last forever. I have a lot of friends who are classical and opera singers. My friend Beverly Sills stopped singing in her 50s, so I'm careful with mine. But I'll keep going as long as it lets me.
My father being in the movie business, I thought being an actor would be great. But when I started singing to people in coffeehouses, you know, singing folk music and then, later, singing songs that I started to write myself, I felt more than an affinity for it.
I want to try to prove that at 100, I could sing as well as I was singing when I was 45 or 43.
Who's judging American Idol? Paula Abdul? Paula Abdul judging a singing contest is like Christopher Reeve judging a dance contest!
When you're on stage singing, you're naked. Your voice is something very intimate, and that's why I'm scared every time before I perform. It doesn't matter if I'm singing for a king or a queen or the Pope, it's enough to be in front of anybody. I suffer, but I can't do anything about it.
There were three great child singing stars: Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Jackie Washington.
To teach a child an instrument without first giving him preparatory training and without developing singing, reading and dictating to the highest level along with the playing is to build upon sand.
When I hear myself singing, I hear Iggy Pop and Jimi Hendrix. There's a conversational thing going on. I suppose it depends on which The Pretenders song you're listening to.
Singing in public makes me very uncomfortable.
I remember when the candle shop burned down. Everyone stood around singing 'Happy Birthday.'
Rock n' Roll came from the slaves singing gospel in the fields. Their lives were hell and they used music to lift out of it, to take them away. That's what rock n' roll should do - take you to a better place.
I try to sing many different kinds of songs. If I sing a batch of humorous songs, I'll throw in a deadly serious song. Or if I'm singing too many serious songs, I'll throw in a ridiculous song, to mix it up.
I can sing in various genres, but my heart truly lies in singing romantic songs. This has been my forte ever since I was 8 or 9.
My style of singing has always been referred to 'soul' singing when it fact it's more influenced by English R&B Blues Shouting. I'm closer to Led Zeppelin as a vocalist than to Ella Fitzgerald. It was torture dealing with major labels.
I started singing in coffeehouses when I was still in high school, in Santa Barbara. I took a job washing dishes and busing tables in the coffeehouse, so I could be there, and would beg permission to sing harmony with the guy who was singing onstage. That was the first time I ever got on a stage in front of people.
I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music - Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering 'The Lost Chord' on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn.
I didn't know that I could do a talk show. I didn't know that we could bring variety to daytime. I didn't know that people wanted to see singing, and dancing and comedy in the morning.
When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing.
Everyone around me was super-cool and laid back and skinny and tan and volleyball-y, and I was just this neurotic kid who was singing 'Annie Get Your Gun.'
My grandmother sang, too, and she was really loud. It was this wild kind of singing. I count her among my influences.
It's important to me that my songs actually make sense. So often, I turn on the radio, and I have no idea what the people are singing about. It may sound good, but when you listen, they're just saying words that rhyme. It's another song about nothing.
Dancing and moving and singing and making music has always made sense to me as a way of being. I didn't know whether it was a viable career path, but I tend to be idealistic.
On the sets, Ali Zafar was extremely entertaining... he would just start singing out of the blue. It was just great!
I was 25 myself once. I also thought I knew everything. I also thought that I could give singers singing advice and comics comedy advice. When you're that age, you know it all, so I understand it. But when you're tired and you don't have patience for it, you definitely snap.
Of the great singing stars of the 1940s and '50s, only one - Nat King Cole - died young, at age 45.
I love singing. It's who I am. When I act, I take a small part of myself and just magnify it, but when I'm singing, that's who I am. I don't write music, so I choose songs that I would have written.
When I started singing, I was covering Lauryn Hill, Brandy, and all the girl groups of the '90s. It's just what I would listen to and what I was singing when anybody asked me to sing for them.
I'd rather be dead than singing 'Satisfaction' when I'm forty-five.
I've always been insecure about my singing. That's why I've focused so much on my songwriting.
The bass line is the anchor for me. I started with the bass, and either doubled that and then added the harmonies, or sometimes added my own harmonies that I've always wanted to sing on the song. And then it just went on from there - singing violin parts and trumpet parts and just trying to emulate the sounds of the instruments.
Singing songs like 'The Man I Love' or 'Porgy' is no more work than sitting down and eating Chinese roast duck, and I love roast duck.
I don't think we should speak so much. What if we were singing a song? We split, whilst singing.
Sinatra was the biggest influence on my life, my singing career. And rightly so. I mean he was the best singer ever.
In 1989, I was on Tiananmen Square with the students, living in their makeshift tents and joining their jubilant singing of the Internationale. In the two decades since, each time that I have gone back, visions from those days seem to return with increasing persistence.
I sound like a chain-smoking drag queen after a hard night of singing 'Tie a Yellow Ribbon'.
We had our unhappy moments but they got channelled into the kind of sadness that was necessary for singing a song about going nowhere. So it worked out very well I think.
