Anoushka Shankar Quotes

As an artist, you have to express yourself. I make no excuses for my versatility. I grew up singing classical arias, but I love rock n' roll and jazz standards.

I love singing jazz. I don't like the idea that classical music should be over here and jazz should be someplace else. It's all wonderful, and we should be open to enjoying it all.

A well-rounded performer will listen to all kinds of music. I like classical, Middle Eastern, and rock a lot.

If you looked at my iPod, you would get a trip out of all the different music, from the real heavy metal to bluegrass to classical.

I have such an eclectic taste. I like listening to classical music and pop music.

My brothers came home with country, jazz, everything... it was always very normal to me to make any type of music. It was possible to fuse all the sounds, so it never sounded confusing to me to mix jazz and dubstep.

I really like jazz and soul, but I also love so many other types of music, and I didn't want to be afraid to blend and experiment.

I always felt music to be universal and undifferentiated - Western classical, folk, Carnatic or Hindustani and so on.

My mom and dad have two very different tastes in music, so they were playing everything from Prince to the Beatles to Aaliyah.

I'm doing this record called 'Epicloud.' Over the course of the full record, there's sort of new agey stuff, jazzy stuff, really heavy stuff. We basically cover the gamut.

I got a reputation for being 'eclectic' or some damn thing like that, but to me, the different kinds of music I play are all the same stuff - good time music - and it is the only stuff I can do.

I'm quite an eclectic musician.

What makes my approach special is that I do different things. I do jazz, blues, country music and so forth. I do them all, like a good utility man.

I love... different kinds of music. I like classical music and pop music. I like alternative, and I like rap, hip-hop, and I kind of collected all these things that I love, and they infused my sensibilities, and I just wanted to sing because it felt like it needed to come out of me.

I've always said that I count myself as a classical crossover artist. To be so, you have to have the core classical training, which I did for many, many years, but also be interested in the pop side of things. You can fit in somewhere in the middle. I feel I do that really well.

In the range of music that we play - roughly 300 years' worth-there really are more similarities than differences.

I think music is so diverse today, and bands are so diverse. If you were a rock band in the Eighties, you kind of had to stick to one thing. Now, in this age of Coachella and European festivals and stuff, it's kind of anything goes, so that allowed us to try different things.

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 band, you know?

I have a very varied taste in music. Everything from rap to classical to Latino to Rat Pack to jazz.

I am genuinely into soul, R&B and hip hop - all these genres that get slapped under the 'soul' genre. That spoke to me more than it did to my punk-rock friends. And punk spoke more to me than it did to my soul friends. I basically didn't fit comfortably in either world.

I like the idea of an eclectic approach, incorporating jazz with other forms and other genres of music.

I had a handful of records, but when I was 11 years old, I liked Puccini as much as Little Richard. They both made sense to me.

Although my music is electronic, it has a lot of influences from my past, which is all sorts of genres; I've been in a rock-metal band for a long time, and I still feel like, personally, I have a lot of influence from that. My classical influence, you can find spots here and there.

I feel like my kind of music is a big pot of different spices. It's a soup with all kinds of ingredients in it.

People often ask us if we had direct influences. Honestly, just a lot of different music - not necessarily individual people. We listen to anything from Bob Dylan to Massive Attack to Aerosmith to En Vogue. We very much enjoy all that music.