I wasn't thinking of competing with any artists as such, I was more thinking of being among them, and sharing thoughts with them; like sharing views, ideas, etc.
Well, maybe it's because of the rumors they had going around, you know, they had some rumors about Dennis Brown was in the hospital and all that. Well, that is all bull!
Sometimes that is why you might even stay in the bathroom for even half an hour, making that water running all over, just singing.
So I did 'Something Happened on the Way to Heaven' and the original version is a ballad. The original Phil record is uptempo but we slowed it down and made it a ballad.
When I first heard that song, it was a ballad but it had a lot more. It felt like a gospel song when I first heard it and it just moved me.
If there was one thing Sam understood, it was guilt. It didn't have to be logical; oftentimes it wasn't. It sawed at your gut relentlessly, tediously, until you wore it like a scar.
I have to feel the audience. I enjoy that feeling of community. There's something sort of spiritual about it in a lot of ways. It's like we're all doing this together.
As a singer, I float around. I'm kind of scatty, bouncing around a lot. I try to adapt to what's going on around me in the song and the arrangement.
I was a pioneer in MTV and I was there from the very beginning. So I saw how that developed and how loose it was and how much fun it was in its looseness. And I was influenced a lot by that.
If you can sing, you never lose your voice. If you don't know how to sing, your voice goes away because you sing from your throat.
In my Philly neighborhood, black and white kids hung together without even thinking about it. The spirit of Martin Luther King was alive and well.
The 'Daryl's House' thing has made me into a live musician even more than I ever was, and even in the way I record.
The biggest honor of my career was when I won R&B Artist of the Year back in the 1970s. I look at that as a major honor.
I haven't been able to write a song about flying. It just sounds cheesy. But for me, there's nothing like being up there.
All the Junos, the Grammy nominations, the gold and platinum records, did nothing to assuage my conviction that I was an out-and-out loser.
The stuff I write I'm very proud of, but I'm smart enough to know I'll never get on the cover of 'Rolling Stone' next to Elvis Costello.
With families, your priorities shift. You're not going to be like, 'Let's go out on tour year-round.' I have kids in school. You have to lay things out.
My brain never turns off of songwriting. Every conversation, everything I see, I'm just kind of like a sponge and I soak it up.
If you put your politicians up for sale, as the US does (alone in this among industrialized democracies), then someone will buy them--and it won’t be you; you can’t afford them.
I mean, I can sit down with a guitar, and in fact, we do two, three songs with just guitar and percussion.
I'm always trying to convince myself there's something important about what I do. But some peoples' lives are really altered by a night at the theater.
