Gloria Estefan Quotes

Mostly everything I've ever sung comes from a personal place.

I wanted to sing about things that moved me and experiences I had collected throughout life.

The whole basis of my singing is feeling. Unless I feel something, I can't sing.

Jazz demands that you bring to it things that are valuable to you, that are personal to you.

I'm just singing about my own life. Singing about all the little stories in my life and the things I've been through.

Music is the soundtrack of your life.

Perhaps, once I am gone, the one thing I might be remembered for is having sung a great deal of Mahler with a great many phenomenal conductors. It is wonderful music, very spiritual.

If you look at the content of songs people write, it's usually about the things they know best.

Artists who write songs... what they're going through usually comes through in their music.

So much of listening to lyrically driven music is projecting your own feelings and experiences into the music.

So when it came to role models, I looked at presidents' wives. Of course, you're talking about a farm girl who stood in the fields, dreaming, years ago, wishing she was that kind of person. But if I had been that kind of person, do you think I could sing with the emotions I do? You sing with those emotions because you've had pain in your heart.

I like to see people's eyes when I'm singing to them.

I put my emotions in my music and I want people to relate to that.

I have a repertoire of songs that I'm proud of, that I've written for my own band. When I do a cover, something that somebody else has written, I think about it very carefully before I sing that song. I have to really get behind it and understand it and like it. And that's how I pick roles. I don't want to play just anything.

Music has been so healing in my life, so the fact that my music could be that for someone else is the best gift of my whole career. People have told me that they got married to my music, divorced to my music, and played my music while they were having their baby.

Writing is a very intimate thing, especially when you write lyrics and sing them in front of someone for the first time. It's like a really embarrassing situation. To me, singing is almost like crying, and you have to really know someone before you can start crying in front of them.

I've never understood people who play up the artifice of music.

Music is emotional. Your job is to make people feel something. The best way to do that is to sing and speak from something they've personally been through. That's where I write from.

I consider myself a songwriter before anything else. The fact that I have been able to write both of my records and establishing myself as a songwriter is super-important to me. Some people have that gift, where they can take on anything and make people believe it. I like to do a song from personal experience.

I can't write music unless I'm deeply connected to it and that connection almost always comes from some experience that I have had or am having.

When Billie Holiday sings a song, I hear the song, but I always hear her and her truth.

I think, with music, I'm a lyricist who talks about real life things.

A lot of times, I have personal things, things I go through that I may exaggerate or make a story around, but it always has a meaning related to something I've been through for real.

I'm very comfortable singing myself, first of all. Secondly, there's a certain disconnect when you write the song and you have someone else sing it for you. And it's kind of like a fakeness about it.

Most of all, I like to sing my heart out to lyrics that really speak to people.