I listen to all kinds of songs. There's something to be learned from every type of music and from the one making it, whether it's pop or jazz or hip-hop.
We'll see some simplistic players for a while, who'll then get into more complicated things and evolve with their instruments. This is a cycle that happens over and over again in music.
I think the women - Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, Erykah Badu - are doing new conceptual things and using their voices to create new American music.
Until I realized that rock music was my connection to the rest of the human race, I felt like I was dying, for some reason, and I didn't know why.
Your spoken voice is a part of it - not a big part of it, but it's something. It puts people at ease, and once again kind of reaches out and makes a bridge for what's otherwise difficult music.
I don't want to be that girl who has that same style all the time where the music always sounds exactly the same, and you always know it's her.
My dream artist to play at prom would be Frank Ocean. 'Thinking Of You' is one of my favorite songs. He makes really sweet music for slow dancing at prom.
What is nice about country music today is that most artists are not trying to do something everybody else is doing. They really are trying to develop their own uniqueness.
You know I want to sing for people, I want to jazz people up I want to make new music that they've never heard.
Jazz of the sort we play is a happy, extroverted music. You don't have to think about it too much.
I'm very hands on with my music - I do all the artwork and everything myself - and the songs I write aren't necessarily the most commercial.
I mean, Internet radio, which is basically a guy with his iTunes putting it over the computer, is the only way you're going to get true eclectic music programmed.
You'll find little schools of musicians experimenting with different ways of making music in Brooklyn, all through Manhattan, in Queens, in Jersey, you know? The city is still bubbling with creativity.
In terms of music, I can try anything I want, even something that doesn't work at all, because I'm not putting my career in jeopardy.
Some say because music is as much about personal expression as listening pleasure, sharing is integral to why songs have value in the first place.
I had no idea what awaited me when I took a job with CBS Records, and it was a total surprise to find I had a gift and an ear for music.
One of the reasons I didn't ever pursue a career - in the music world if you're black or mixed, you need to be able to belt a song or else you're not a singer, you know?
My mother knew how to read music and everything. But I just kinda learned off of records. And so, I was listening to records and I'd play 'em over and over.
What is American music? The most satisfying answer I've come across is that it was a kind of natural comfort with the vernacular which is diverse and regional; it's not one particular set of sounds.
Every child should have time for arts, music, sports, drama, robotics, school newspapers and the like, not to mention recess and play.
My feet always danced to Irish traditional music, but I was very glad to get out of the North of Ireland in the mid-Seventies when it was really closed and tight and relentlessly unforgiving.
