Talib Kweli Quotes

I think music gives so much inspiration. I listen to all kinds of music: pop, hip-hop, everything. I also love classical music.

'Hatful of Hollow' and 'The Smiths' were lent to me, and they made me want to create music that might make another person feel like they made me feel - to have an effect on someone.

We're quite different from each other. Camila is the pop girl, Lauren likes the indie sound, Normani and I love R&B, and Ally is the pop-country, kind of church girl.

R. Kelly is one of the pioneers that I grew up listening to. If he's classified as an R&B artist, then I want to be like that. I don't want to have limits either.

I listened to a lot of Jay-Z and Kanye coming up, which would be unexpected for a boy bander like me. But I'd listen to a lot of that, and a lot of Ed Sheeran, actually.

It's a real gift to be able to have the works of brilliant, great people to learn from and build from. It gives you so much more to draw on, and then you don't have to be all about three-chord pop songs. I don't really like that kind of writing.

I equally love both, classic rock and hip-hop. I love all music, really, and I really use classic rock a lot. I'm heavily influenced by that melodically in my music. I can't really separate the two.

I like rap. I like anything with soul. I like anything you can feel, anything that makes you think that the artist had to make that song, or they were going to go crazy.

I like music. Country, hip-hop, R&B, sometimes classical.

I hated country music growing up, but it gets in your bone marrow, kind of like a disease.

I like the fact that I have the power to convey a lot of emotion through my songs. I like to channel that when I'm singing. I think it's just a mix of R&B, soul, but then I kind of move more into the pop world and electronic pop and stuff like that.

But when I hear a great song, I can't help but be inspired by it, regardless of whatever genre that song falls under.

I often say that I want to write like Tupac rapped. I could listen to his album, and within a few minutes, I could go from thinking deeply to laughing to crying to partying.

I draw inspiration from everywhere, whether it's country, R&B, gospel.

I listened to a lot of reggae music, a lot of Caribbean, a lot of gospel, a lot of rock, a lot of country, hip-hop... you know, so it just gave me perspective when it came to music and what I liked.

My favorite Eminem song is probably 'Lose Yourself' because I can relate to it a lot. That's how I feel every time I write a rhyme.

The only thing is, with me - this may sound weird - there are a lot of R&B singers from that era that I actually don't know. Like, I never grew up on Boyz II Men.

My mum and dad used to listen to a lot of R&B and soul, so this was the way I grew up. Hip-hop, of course. But then as I grew older, I started listening to everything.

In the middle of Mississippi, so many kinds of music came, but it was Nashville and country music that pulled my heart.

I grew up listening to Bob Marley, Jill Scott, Floetry, Nas, Jay-Z, Beyonce.

Country is and always will be my heart, but I don't have a problem with it spilling over into pop if it wants to.

So from Jazz, Blues, R&B, Soul, Classical and Country music, Hip Hop has introduced us to a little bit of everything.

I write to music, so every script I have has its own playlist. Music just opens me up to the emotions that I'm writing.

I don't really see huge barriers between any styles of music. My definition of music is "organizing sound and silence into emotion," and that's a very broad definition.

I write with music. I write scenes in movies that hopefully can earn the use of some songs that are powerful to me.