Jon Secada Quotes

My advice would be to write what is most personal and specific to your experience or your life. And your voice will emerge and because of its specificity, it will be universal.

My songwriting is personal in the hope that listeners will know that I relate to them.

I'm still writing from personal experiences, which is what people connected with in the first place.

The hardest thing to get is true emotion. I always believe you need to earn that with the audience. You can't just tell them, 'Ok, be sad now.'

Almost everybody will listen to you when you tell your own story.

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

The way I write my songs is that I have to believe what I'm writing about, and that's why they always end up being so personal - because the kind of artists I like, they convince me, they totally win me over straight away in that thing. Like, 'Oh my God, this song is totally about me.'

I was never trying to be the voice for anybody else. I was just trying to sing about what I was going through, and was singing about those things specifically because I knew there was an audience not being served.

We have a song like 'Ready to Love Again' that is really, really special to me. It's the one that I relate to the most. It's very personal, so we really allowed ourselves to go there and be vulnerable and show the fans that we feel and we hurt and we love just like anybody else does. I hope they feel that when they hear it.

I think that talking about the personal specificity, personal details, is how you get the big, big audiences - by talking about your relationships or your personal tragedies. If you reach out with that energy, you'll touch people.

Country music busts the wall between performer and audience. There's a connection because there's a vulnerability, a confessional quality, to so much of the songwriting. Those lyrics take you in.

I think I take little pieces of inspiration, then kind of do what's real to me and what's going on in my life or what I observe from other people's experiences and hope other people connect with it, too.

You're creating an intimacy that everybody feels, that it's their experience, not yours. I'll never introduce a song and say, now this song is about 'my' broken heart.

You've got a song you're singing from your gut, you want that audience to feel it in their gut. And you've got to make them think that you're one of them sitting out there with them too. They've got to be able to relate to what you're doing.

My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.

To be honest with my music... for me to expect anyone to connect it has to come from a place of honesty.

As a fan, I connect with realness. Whether it's strong or vulnerable, if it's real, I can connect with it.

What I say is from my heart. You must be sincere. So when I sing a song, people are supposed to feel it.

I realized that there's this fine line between being personal and being general and being alienating.

The only thing I wanted to do in my music is be human and communicate all the aspects of that, which often means being vulnerable.

I feel like the more I share, the more relatable I am.

I think when I show my vulnerability, people relate with that because they know deep down inside that they have vulnerable moments, and they can really connect and identify with me on those things.

Honestly, my goal is just to let people hear my story and just like, feed everybody that could relate to my story in any way.

I want everyone who's listening to know who I am and not just see me as this singer. I want them to feel connected to my story.

You don't always have to have the most amazing story. It's learning to share the story you have that counts.