I'm dead serious about my craft and just really serious about making music in itself. I take pride in making songs and albums where no two songs sound alike. That's the challenge and that's what it's all about, to keep it original and fresh and funky...
My music, I feel, has always been experimental, but it had got to a point where I felt disconnected from it completely. I didn't want to be a Clark Kent/Superman: I couldn't really say, 'Well, B.o.B's the old me, and Bobby Ray's the new me.' I had to...
I've not been an admirer of contemporary music since punk rock went off the boil in 1977, but once a year I'll listen to 'Spiral Scratch' by the Buzzcocks, or 'Hippy Hippy Shake' by the Swinging Blue Jeans. Otherwise, I can put up with Chopin or shak...
Yeah, because what it all boils down to is at the end of the day, we are all riding on the same boat and we have to learn how to deal with each other. I think that the music and what we do in our actions is what can kind of bring us together, hopeful...
Living in a capital in Europe but still surrounded by mountains and ocean, my relationship to music was strongest walking to school and back. I would sing to myself and very quickly started mapping out my melodies to landscapes - at the time I just t...
I think music is something that can, and should, be used to get you into different things because eventually what goes up must come down - we're not going to be the number one group in the world forever - so you have to have something else to fall ba...
I feel that after all those horrible reviews and jokes, I wasn't crazy all these years to stand up for the music I believe in. This album has proven that somewhere in the human race, the human heart is still racing and breaking and I am so grateful.
One of my main problems with music is that the basic formula is always the same: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus, chorus, chorus, end. One of the bands that changed that was The Beatles. If you listen to 'Everybody's Got Something...
G.O.O.D. Music is just real tastemakers, man. Kanye's a real tastemaker. One thing that I feel is tight about G.O.O.D. is that a lot of people have their own style, and you can see that. My style is different than Pusha's, it's different than Cudi's....
I had an advantage because people would post me on blogs because I had co-signs from Kanye West, Def Jam, and G.O.O.D. Music. Everything I put out, the blogs would put up. When I realized that, I used that to my advantage and helped build my followin...
The wonderful thing about rock music is even if you hate the other person, sometimes you need him more, you know. In other words if he's the guy that made that sound, he's the guy that made that sound, and without that guy making that sound, you don'...
I was always drawn to performing. I took improv and acting classes during the summers and was involved in middle and high school plays. But when I discovered indie and punk music in high school, those things sort of took over.
Podcasting is not really that different from streaming music, which we've done for quite a long time. Having a traditional podcast that people subscribe to - the hype is ahead of the quality. Podcasting is essentially a download, and you run into cop...
The music began, and it was one of those life-changing moments. I saw an artist, Janis Joplin. She was exhilarating. She was vibrating. And she was like no other artist that I had ever seen before... It struck me that hard. Maybe the word is epiphany...
The Sixties were different in an isolated place. We got two television channels if the wind was blowing in the right direction. The radio stations went off at sundown. Then you picked up Chicago and heard the teenage music you really yearned for.
I think most people's record collections are more interesting than radio generally gives them credit for. You're likely to be as interested in the Grateful Dead as Palestrina. It pisses me off how compartmentalised music is. I used to be in a punk ba...
Purcell is a composer who had a formative influence on British music - even The Who now cite him as an influence. There's an intense, dirty harmony, but there's a Louis XIV kind of elan and style, too. He had the melancholy DNA of our national folk h...
Portland in particular is a cheap enough place to live that you can still develop your passion - painting, writing, music. People seem less status-conscious. Even wealthy people buy second-hand clothes and look a little bit homeless.
I started classical and operatic lessons when I was 8 and become an operatic singer and went to competition. I write my own music. A lot of the songs, growing up, I was into writing dark stories and poems, and one day I started putting melodies to th...
The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.
Before 'American Idol' and all this stuff, I was obsessed with music charts, and I used to go online to find out what was popular in other countries. I'd log on to the BBC website, and that's how I found out about artists like Natasha Bedingfield, Da...
