I basically was in charge of the Jackson 5 - all their creative, when it came down to the studio, and all their musical endeavors. I tried to create a Hitsville on the West Coast.
Pop belonged to more musical people in earlier times, but we've sort of gotten away from that. Now it's software people. I kind of feel like reclaiming it is in order.
To transform a grimace into a sound sounds impossible, yet it is possible to transform a vision into music, to go outside an enslaved personality, to become impersonal by transforming into sand, into water, into light.
I believe in the understanding of difficult situations, difficult music, or any kind of difficulties, through familiarity. Familiarity, in this case, does not breed contempt, but breeds understanding.
Quality is timeless: It will clearly define itself. And so I make reference to and acknowledge things that I feel have been dismissed, trying to restate those musical and cultural elements clearly and vehemently.
I'm always working out; I did ice hockey in high school, but I'm not a dance person. I mean, this was horrible, but I had a dance double in my high-school musical.
My dream collaboration is with Lauryn Hill. Is that ever gonna' happen? Who knows! But there's still a lot I feel like musically I could do.
I'm naturally going to react to that and he'll bring out elements in my musical character that were lying dormant, because I'm relating what he's playing.
I believe I became one of the first singers to be launched via television exposure. I guess I was a new kind of musical stylist for a new kind of media.
I play a percussion instrument, not a musical saw; it needs no amplification. Where it's needed, they put a microphone in front of the bass drum. But, I don't think it's necessary to play that way every night.
Music has always assuaged my lacerations, brightened my hours, added glow to my little joys and given wings to my fantasy flights.
I think I'm a vocal genius, not a musical genius. I like background vocals. I consider myself a voice, not a singer. A voice is a sound, and singing is what you do with that sound.
The designs were based on quite a lot of research of what a movie musical is, filtered through the eyes of today. If we'd gone strictly with the '20s, the movement would have been impaired.
For anybody to say well this is not Hip Hop and that's not Hip Hop, that is not the way the formula was laid down. It was for the people who were going to continue take anything musically and string it along.
There is a strange sort of reasoning in Hollywood that musicals are less worthy of Academy consideration than dramas. It's a form of snobbism, the same sort that perpetuates the idea that drama is more deserving of Awards than comedy.
I believe that art has a kind of rightness, as in music, when we hear whether or not a note is false
The muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks, She makes a sweeter music than is heard.
I listened to John Denver and Simon & Garfunkel. Edith Piaf was a huge favourite. Then I discovered musicals - I loved 'Les Miserables' - and, at about 14, I started listening to David Gray.
It's - as opposed to tape where you have a magnetic tape that's excited by frequencies that you hit, digital was a process where musical sounds are transferred to numbers and stored as numbers.
Sometimes I write them down in musical notation as a trigger to remind me about certain directions to go. Or I can be specific about a sound I'm looking for.
Living is art. Breathing and heart beating is music. Seeing is painting the world with our eyes. Touching is sculpting the shape of everything. Life is the most intense art of all.
