I'd quite like to have one place where I stay put. And I don't like living in cities all the time. In order to have ideas, you have to have some peace and quiet.
I would say I grew up listening a lot to Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland and Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. I grew up listening to those because my parents were kind of into folk music.
I was really lost for a while in my teens. I was angry. But when I found music - Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell - it was a new discovery. It was a door to this other world where I wanted to be.
My big influences are Joni Mitchell, and a lot of classical and Indian music, as well as Nina Simone and the personal blues and jazz of Billie Holiday. Other influences for me include Bjork, Nick Drake, and Sufjan Stevens.
I am multiracial, and I went through different phases - at one point, I listened to Wu-Tang and hip-hop, and then the next year I listened to Joni Mitchell.
You think about child abuse and you think of a father viciously attacking a daughter or a son, but in my family it was my mother. My mother, I would say, was a... very brutal disciplinarian.
But even though all this was going on at home, if someone had tried to take me away and put me in a children's home, I couldn't have handled it. Even though my mother was very brutal, it was my home.
On first listening, Joni Mitchell's 'Court And Spark,' the first truly great pop album of 1974, sounds surprisingly light; by the third or fourth listening, it reveals its underlying tensions.
I'm an old-school, embarrassing Joni Mitchell fan. Her music made a hook in my soul and hasn't let go for all these years. I even sing her songs as lullabies to my kids.
People were very affected by the war. But it didn't mean you stopped painting unless you were called into the Army; then you just couldn't paint. But otherwise one continued.
I can't understand it when people are closed-minded. I mean, boy, have I made mistakes and been very wrong. I can't tell you the amounts of times I've been let down, but I still try to see the best in people.
I grew up when comics were only sold in food markets and news stands, so the direct market is vital to me. The best way to make it stronger is if everybody buys my comics in multiple copies before they buy any others.
My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation.
There were bars that began to have acoustic musicians play, it was 1970: Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, America, The Eagles, all that kind of stuff was popular. It was very easy for me to just kind of move in and be noticed.
Most of us yearn for really intimate, healthy, in-person relationships. People have a deep desire to be understood, to be told that it's OK, that you're not isolated and broken, that this is part of the human challenge, and that there is hope. The ca...
When Kate was born, she was born into a world of joy and happiness and confidence. The difference between the children is night and day. She's happy, she's thriving, she's full of self-confidence. I tell her she's beautiful every day before I send he...
I think there's a great homogenizing force that software imposes on people and limits the way they think about what's possible on the computer. Of course, it's also a great liberating force that makes possible, you know, publishing and so forth, and ...
My teacher, my great cello teacher Leonard Rose, was such a great cellist, and nurturing man, very patient. But I grew up not only admiring him, but obviously Casals, Rostrotovich, Jacqueline du Pre, and many others, including many of my peers and co...
One of the biggest obstacles I've overcome in my life was thinking I didn't deserve to be successful. Artistically I'm not as much of a heavyweight as someone like Paul Simon or Joni Mitchell, because I'm not a creator of original music, and I worrie...
Joni Mitchell seems destined to remain in a state of permanent dissatisfaction - always knowing what she would like to do, always more depressed when it's done.
After I got this job at the syndicate, I started sending them money so they could go on trips and do the things they could never afford to do. All the while, I never knew that my mother was socking money away.
