No one had ever told me that whites were supposed to sing one kind of music and blacks another - I sang what I liked in the only voice I had.
I think I definitely learned how to structure songs, just from listening to a lot of 1960s, 1970s pop music, although I'm sure my mother's watchful eye had a lot to do with it.
I think it's so dope that I'm here in Chicago and contributing to the music scene that's thriving. People are so happy Chicago's shining that everyone is willing to say 'I represent Chicago.' That wasn't always the case.
The way we're going about things and what we want to do, we feel it has to be a really pure essence of music. That's where you get the most out of it.
I realised a long time ago that instrumental music speaks a lot more clearly than English, Spanish, Yiddish, Swahili, any other language. Pure melody goes outside time.
Sometimes my boyfriend would write the lyrics and I would write the melody, and other times I would start from scratch. Or sometimes I would take a local poem and put that to music.
New Orleans is a place where people are deliberately undereducated so that they can be a labour class - the economy there is tourism, and one of the only outlets that black males have traditionally been allowed is to play jazz music, y'know?
I wondered how people would take me being a country music singer. I thought about deviating from that and singing other things. But... it doesn't really make sense for me to try to be something that I'm not.
My inner rock chick has always been there. I grew up listening to a lot of rock music through my sisters, who were teenagers while I was young, so they had control of the radio.
I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.
Some artists and indie musicians see Spotify fairly positively - as a way of getting noticed, of getting your music out there where folks can hear it risk-free.
We all have such common ways to identify with each other, and I think when you approach music in that organic way, it's almost indescribable how it connects human to human and heart to heart.
Well, I heard of Sunny Ade, and looks as if his music is gonna be big on a global level, because I was in London the other day and some people asked me to review the album.
Patty Griffin is iconic, and there's no other word to really describe her. She is iconic for a lot of people - not only for me but for a lot of fans. Her voice is one of a kind, and she's such an important figure in the American music scene.
I would do a Byrds tour or a Byrds record in a minute. I miss that band now. I've tried to convince Roger over and over to do it, but he's not interested. Music isn't something you can legislate into being.
My parents were just really weird and protective about the music I listened to. Whenever I wanted to buy an album, they would have to buy it first and listen to it and let me know if I could have it.
What I play now isn't surf music. It's too powerful. I used to go through paper bags; now I go through brick walls. I play hard.
Most often the music does end up in the movie, and sometimes there's a point where I wish that it wasn't, just because I think the score would be more effective if there was less of it. But, again, that's not my call.
I can write a program that lets you break the copy protection on a music file. But I can't write a program that solders new connections onto a chip for you.
Even before Europe was united in an economic level or was conceived at the level of economic interests and trade, it was culture that united all the countries of Europe. The arts, literature, music are the connecting link of Europe.
When I joined Nirvana, I was the fifth or sixth drummer - I don't know if they'd ever had a drummer they were totally happy with. And they were strangers. There was never much of a deeper connection outside of the music.
