When I got pregnant, I started singing again. It was my saving grace. I literally mean having this amazing human life, and our relationship in the sense of mother and child, redeemed my soul.
When I was 5 years old I started singing in church and I hated my voice because I sounded like a grown woman, not a child. I was ashamed of it.
I can play the flute. Music was my favourite A-level, and I used to love composing my and stylising my voice to sound like 90's singing sensation Tori Amos.
When I left school, I got a job in a shoe shop and I used to save 15 quid a week and pay for my own singing and acting lessons.
In my head, I have the most sensational singing voice. I perform concerts to thousands in the shower. The reality is I can hold a tune. The dream is a West End musical one day - no, really!
In songwriting, I needed language. And I always believed in singing about what I do.
Fortunately, I have always played a lot of sports, so I keep my lungs in good shape. That translates to singing as well.
I'm not attracted to naturalism, I'm not attracted to behavior, I'm attracted to dance. I'm attracted to gesture, I'm attracted to singing with your voice, as opposed to having a natural manner. I'm a theater actor first, so that probably influences a lot of my approach. And I think in many ways, naturalism has ruined movies.
It's taken me other places, but it was the impulse to write that led me to singing. I'm not a musician. I never thought of performing in a rock n' roll band. I was just drawn in. It was like being called to duty - I was called to duty, and I did my duty as best as I could.
Elton John can be a master of the sleight of hand. The arrangements make it seem like there are substantial melodies underneath the tracks - but almost nothing demands repeated listenings. Similarly, he always sounds like he's singing up a storm, but his voice glosses over the material, reducing most things to an uninteresting sameness.
My mother was 13 when I was born. My childhood was pretty frantic, to say the least. My mother left when I was about 5, and Daddy started me singing in clubs. Then I started singing on the radio in Oklahoma City when I was 7.
I've never considered myself an actor; I get much more immediate satisfaction singing. If you sing good, people clap. On television, you never know whether you've done well or not.
There's something about singing that I just love. It makes me feel freer than anything in the world.
Singing has been a passion of mine, equal to or greater than acting, ever since I was very small.
Singing with Aaron Neville, he pulled stuff out of my voice I never could have gotten, because if he's providing XYZ, I have to put in ABC, and usually I don't have to put in ABC.
Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument - learning to do your craft - that's the most important thing! It's not about what goes on in a computer!
I am not a Ph.D. in economics or a doctorate in literature that I can afford to take my singing lightly. Even if I sing a jingle, I take it as seriously as oxygen.
When I lost my record deal, and my phone wasn't ringing, I realized that I had to reassess who Vesta was and figure out what was going wrong. I knew it wasn't my singing ability. So it had to be that I was expendable because I didn't have the right look.
If it weren't for singing, I don't know what else I would do with myself.
They look for the top note to end every song. They don't know what they are singing about. There is no style.
At school, I'd be the dude singing to the girls, always up in the auditorium, in the lunch room singing Christmas carols, in the halls between class. I was always singing, and same thing with my grandfather. The apple doesn't fall too far from the tree; you know how that goes.
I wasn't even singing when we first started Lion Babe, so my voice has only gotten stronger.
When I think of Mick Jagger still singing that he can't get any satisfaction in over forty years of being in the Rolling Stones, I have to conclude that he's either lying or not all that bright.
I have made a career out of my hobby, which is an incredibly fortunate position to be in, but you have to have the passion. Even today, I will go down to the studio and start singing for what I think is 10 minutes, and I look at the clock, and it's been two hours.
Singing together is something human beings just do, and there are hundreds of years worth of just European vocal music available to read and hear.
Singing gives me a lot of energy.
I love the sound of voices singing together, congregational singing, anything like gospel, or folk, or sea shanties. I spent quite a bit of time in choirs growing up, and in the world-touring music group, Anuna. It's a sound with very rich texture, voices singing together.
I carry on singing because I love it. The closer you are to the end, the more you understand how important it is.
Singing well has always been important to me, but the most important factor is the connection to the audience.
I have learnt sketching, drawing, singing, dancing, rifle shooting, paragliding.
I was never really interested in an operatic post, but I took on the Bastille because it seemed a unique opportunity to build an opera ensemble from scratch, and to deal with all the disciplines that go into opera - the music, the staging and the singing - in an interrelated way.
I've been writing songs since I was, like, five and I've been singing since, like, I can't remember.
I went through a string of A&R men who all thought I should be doing something different. One thought I should be a dance diva; another thought I should do Rock n' Roll; and one thought I shouldn't even be singing at all!
I look for songs that the listener, when they hear it, they believe what I'm singing about, that I know what I'm singing about. That's my whole deal. I try to choose songs that a male or a female can perform and relate to.
'Love Will Keep Us Together' was a combination of three different singing styles - Al Green, the Beach Boys, and Diana Ross. I loved all these people, and I put their singing styles together and wrote that tune.
I sang in 'Waiting for Guffman,' and I sang in 'A Mighty Wind.' I can carry a tune, but I don't like that Broadway singing.