Saul Williams Quotes

I come from an art-school background, and I still feel that in my music, it's about exploration and challenging myself, about putting myself in a place that's frightening because I haven't been there before.

Your limitations create your sound.

I'm playing with music and working on different types of music. But I've realised that I can't really stray from what is my marker.

With our first two records we backed ourselves into a hole musically.

I found the blues too limiting, and classical was too disciplined.

I've always had creative freedom. Instrumental rock wasn't really a genre, but the success of 'Surfing With the Alien' legitimized my approach.

When you start out with goals - mine were to play polytonally and polyrhythmically - you never exhaust that. I started doing that in the 1940s. It's still a challenge to discover what can be done with just those two elements.

I definitely try to broaden the scope of music. I don't know if it's pop or classical or what, but I'm religiously challenging myself all the time, for better or for worse.

To be honest, and this comes out of left field, but I would love to do something with Jay-Z or Eminem. I have no limitations when it comes to the stuff I want to do musically. So to be able to do something like that I think would be really, really cool.

The Jug Band was exactly what I wanted to do, and it wasn't my idea.

I think anything I do will have an island feel, but I don't want it to be just that; I don't want to be put in a box.

I think music needs danger; it needs risk.

I wouldn't say no to other kinds of musical opportunities. I guess that it just depends on what it was or what it required me to do, and if I felt that it compromised my own soul.

But that's something that I like about scoring film: it makes me reach out of the parameters of my self, it requires me to do things musically that I wouldn't normally do left to my own devices.

Working with Prince, it's kind of like he's opened up this whole new world, especially with the horn players. And I'm like, 'Man, only if I had strings on this album, too.' And I'm like, 'I wish I had an orchestra.' So I just, you know - I just wonder what's next, you know. I just want to constantly push myself for more.

Miles Davis would have this lineup of all these amazing musicians and one day would just say, 'We're done.' After tons of great records and tickets sold, he said, 'Now I'm going to grow my hair out and play my horn through a wah-wah pedal.' Rather than play it safe, he went on.

Certain jazz musicians just copy what was done 100 years ago. The music won't grow if nobody takes a risk.

I never thought of myself as being the singer that wanted to create an identity and then stick to that.

When you're fat and comfortable, your music is going to sound fat and comfortable.

Every time I hear a recording I've made, I hear all kinds of things I could improve or things I should have done. There's always so much more to be done in music. It's so vast.

I kind of idolized older punk-rock and hip-hop bands, and I was, like, 15 when I started the Beastie Boys. And what business did we having doing that at that age?

Sometimes it's very hard for other New Orleans musicians to break out. It starts with the musician. They have to be willing to take a risk. Playing in the city, you can get comfortable. You think things are going well, but you're always in the city.

I have always tried with my shows - win, lose, or draw - to take the boundaries of music as far as I can.

I think the people who are saying jazz has to sound a particular way, or, 'What you're doing isn't jazz,' are just scared because they can't do it. A lot of them just aren't talented enough to do anything new, honestly.

I knew exactly what to do in The Seekers but I didn't know what it would be like to be a solo artist.