Laura Mvula Quotes

When I play, I very quickly put myself into a light hypnotic trance and compose while playing, drawing directly from the emotions.

You're just playing, playing, playing, and then an image or something will come into your mind, and basically you're just narrating it with music, letting it move along.

What I've learned how to do as I've gotten older is to take all of the information that I have, and push it aside, and try to distill each song into an emotional theme. The hardest thing that I've ever had to learn how to do in playing music is use the sound of my instrument to create an emotional effect.

I play as I feel.

You're in good spirits when you create and produce great music. All situations inspire music in different ways, man, from good situations, bad situations, depression, falling in love, falling out of love. I've been going through all those type of things.

I listen to music to when I'm feeling a certain way or to make myself feel a certain way. So why not make my own music inspired by true emotions?

I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions.

I'm trying to learn to really use space. My philosophy is that every time you interrupt space in a very confident, secure manner, then music happens.

The feeling that you want the listener to get, you should get yourself when you first hit that chord, and that melody comes to mind.

If you wanna write a song, ask a guitar

Music should be able to invoke the natural emotions in all human beings. Music is not notes fixed on apiece of paper.

For me, something will come in my head and I'll either end up calling my cell phone to record it, or I'll just pick my guitar up and see what comes out. Sometimes it sucks, sometimes it doesn't. So there's really no set method behind it.

I never have used any other artist as a model for a sound or a song. It always has to come from an emotion, and capturing the essence of that emotion in a song.

Inspiration for my music just comes from, you know, my life experiences.

Every song I've ever written always starts with the words because I want the music to be the musical extension of the feelings of the words, and not the words being the emotional extension of the feeling of the music.

Music is an emotion, and I put it out there.

I never write from concept. The beat is the beginning, and then I fill in the rest of the song into what it should be.

When I start working on a batch of tunes - like roughly 10 solid tunes - I always know there'll be another 10 to follow, because for every song I invest a lot of time in, there's another song waiting behind it.

These seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words.

Music is essentially an emotional language, so you want to feel something from the relationships and build music based on those feelings.

The guitar for me is a translation device. It's not a goal. And in some ways, jazz isn't a destination for me. For me, jazz is a vehicle that takes you to the true destination - a musical one that describes all kinds of stuff about the human condition and the way music works.

I want to be an improviser, and I've worked very hard at that. It's an art. You don't just play whatever comes into your head; you have to be very deliberate about what you do.

Music can describe emotions far more accurately than words ever can. As soon as I realised that, I knew music was where I wanted to be.

A composer knows that music is written by human beings for human beings and that music is a continuation of life, not something separated from it.

Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.