Music will always be my No. 1 passion, but I don't have to be doing it professionally. It's not really about that for me anymore. I feel like I don't have to look at it as a career. I can just rest in it and just be.
Soul music is about longevity and reaching and touching people on a human level - and that's never going to get lost.
Heartbreak was the impetus to me writing poems and music in the first place.
I've always been a firm believer that soul music never dies. The artists we still listen to today, years after their music was first heard are mostly soul artists; Donny Hathaway, Marvin Gaye, Chaka Khan. We still sing along to all of them with our h...
That's what I enjoy most about my music - that it heals in its own time and makes us look at ourselves in its own time.
Music shouldn't be a chore or feel like any kind of burden.
My intention is to make music that you can enjoy at all times.
I could hear music playing in the background of works by certain authors, like Poe and Shakespeare. And I discovered Nikki Giovanni when I was in eighth grade. Her writing has a musical energy with pulse and rhythm, almost like jazz or hip-hop.
I had a brother six years older than me, so I wasn't just listening to teenybopper stuff. My brother had the cooler music, but my parents had the Burt Bacharach, Tom Jones, the Association, the Fifth Dimension; these groups were un-cool, but I secret...
I like being a storyteller. I'm bored with myself; I like to write about others. I have a lot of names in my songs: Karen, Margaret, Mary Kay. Even if it's about me, I want to put it through someone else. The music is the soundtrack to the story.
When I write songs, I like to write lyrics first, and I think that's different from a lot of singer-songwriters. But I heard Sammy Cahn was asked what comes first, the lyrics or the music, and he said, 'The paycheck.'
Most of my friends are from the music scene.
It was the early days of Rock 'n' Roll in this country. We were all struggling to learn music, it might be Country, Jazz, Classical, Blues or even Rock 'n' Roll.
I actually have a degree in music and was aware that music was a tool used in therapy. I didn't realize how far it had come since I was in college in the mid-seventies.
Another night I dreamed I heard heavenly music sounding in my ears, and a flock of sheep was gathering round it. When the music ceased, the sheep leaped for joy, and ran together, shaking their heads; and one shook his head almost off, and seemed to ...
To me, our music is like Jamaican stuff - if they can't hear it, they're not supposed to hear it. It's not for them if they can't understand it.
I'm not technical. When I listen to music, I gravitate more toward the sonic aspect of it. The technical stuff of it, I get bored with it. These long solos? OK, already. You know your scales, big deal. I know it, too, but I don't want to do that.
It does just boil down to music.
A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.
I'm Irish as hell: Kelly on one side, Shanley on the other. My father had been born on a farm in the Irish Midlands. He and his brothers had been shepherds there, cattle and sheep, back in the early 1920s. I grew up surrounded by brogues and Irish mu...
Some actors are brilliant in David Mamet, but they would crash and burn in my plays and visa-versa. You either have my music in your body, or you don't.
