I'm so hard on myself. I play these sketches in my computer for friends and they say 'Gee whiz, the vocal's beautiful.' I hear, 'It needs to be better.'
Relations between black and white would be greatly improved if we were more accepting of our fears and our feelings and more vocal about it.
I never, my producer never, we never let myself just sing. We were always trying to get the perfect vocal.
I think my style as far as vocal delivery and even down to the pronunciation of certain words is so deliberate.
You empower everything you complain about. You strengthen the negative things you speak of. And you energize the problems you vocalize.
The problem is I'm a perfectionist, so the producer might say he's happy with my vocal take but I'll say, 'No, it can be better.' I'll do it again and again until I feel I've got the truth out of a song.
And I loved Fats Waller. I love his instrumental abilities, his vocal abilities and his sense of humor.
All my vocals were recorded at home, which was great for me. You can actually have a studio in a computer program called ProTools. I did half the record with ProTools.
I think any song should sound good just played on a solitary instrument with the vocal. If you have those basics you have all you need. The production then just polishes that idea into the finished thing.
I feel like vocals are to music what portraits are to painting. They're the humanity. Landscapes are good and fine, but at the end of the day everyone loves the Mona Lisa.
I definitely don't subscribe to the theory that more instruments, or more vocal tracks, harmony, or double tracking the voice, is a good thing. People do their early albums very stripped down, then each album becomes bloated.
I don't think it's important to be that good at singing. I think people who are good at singing sing backing vocals for pop stars. It's about how you project. I wouldn't consider myself to be a singer.
If even in science there is no a way of judging a theory but by assessing the number, faith and vocal energy of its supporters, then this must be even more so in the social sciences: truth lies in power.
You don't always have to be a leader and be as vocal as I am. I'm sure some people would love it if I didn't talk as much as I did.
When making the first album, I think I wrote a song about every six months. The first album was so much about the vocals carrying it.
Chet Faker's a reference to the late Chet Baker. I'm a big fan of his vocal style; it's quite fragile and soft, and that was a style I wanted to take on.
You can call me an Eisenhower Republican. There is a gigantic gulf between an Eisenhower Republican and the kind of fringe brand of Republicanism that is being so vocally promoted today.
You don't move just because you want to go from this point to that point - the body has to be using the words as well as you vocally use the words.
James Brown was one of the first artists who found four bars that he liked and played them the entire way through, and then he just added to it vocally.
AC/DC's 'Highway to Hell' is the greatest meshing of vocal, guitar, and content I've ever heard. That's what I aspire to.
The longer I'm alive, the more I realize how little I know. Pretending that you know everything about every topic, and being very vocal about it? That's an instant turnoff.
