Natalie Cole Quotes

All my life I wanted to play music with love to every member of the audience.

I love writing songs and being a musician, but you can't really buy the feeling of connecting with people.

Performing a song is intense. When I see people connecting, it makes it all worthwhile.

When I go to a gig and I hear a song that I really like, a song that hits home to me or hits an emotional nerve, if I could ever recreate that for someone, that would be the ultimate goal.

How does my music connect to an audience? That is just a complete mystery to me.

When I play a song for someone the first time, if I make 'em laugh, I think, 'Yes, I've succeeded.'

I connect emotionally to these songs. I mean what I say when I say it, and that allows your audience to connect. That's the number-one reason why any music is successful, because you make people feel something.

Whenever you write music, you want it to touch people on a certain level. I mean, I've been reading tweets about 'Troublemaker' and people saying 'OMG, I can so relate to this - this is a guy that I fancy, or a girl that I fancy; it's exactly like this person.'

Own every note I sing and sell it. Make a connection to the audience. That's what it comes down to, you know?

We do play to our audience. It's very important. You can't create music in a vacuum.

We can play all we want, but if nobody's there, if nobody feels anything with what we're playing, then what's the purpose?

I did a lot of touring in my youth, and I learnt very quickly that giving is what it's all about. It's about the gift of making an audience feel great and forget their cares, if only for a few hours.

You try to stay in the moment and act like you're singing the song for the first time. You try to have a good time yourself. That's the most important thing. If you're having a good time, people will join you.

When you're playing music and you're starting to expose yourself for the first time, there's nothing more powerful than being listened to and being actually heard.

"Born To Run," that expands every time we go out. It just seems to you - more of your life fills it in, fills in the story. And when we hit it every night, it's always a huge catharsis. It's fascinating to see the audience singing it back to me. It's quite wonderful, you know, to see people that intensely singing your song.

I find a lot of joy just going out and playing for people.

One of the hardest things in the world is to perform on record and get someone to enjoy and feel what you're doing. It's unlike, like TV you can, you can fake it with the face and the crying and the bits. Recording is completely different.

Music - you need the give and take from the audience, the feeling of attention. It's not about me: it's about the music itself.

I just want to play music with a band, live.

I've always enjoyed playing live onstage.

Nobody was listening when I learned how to play music. But there's something about being on stage, talking to the audience, looking at them and smiling, that's always been difficult for me. I'm a lot more comfortable now, but there are still moments of awkwardness.

I haven't been to many music events where somebody was performing and it actually made me cry.

Out there in the spotlight you're a million miles away and every ounce of energy you try to give away as the sweat pours out your body like the music that you play.

When you're onstage and the audience is smiling and singing and bopping along and you're all on the same level, it's the best feeling in the world. It may sound dumb and corny to say it, but it's like pure love.

That's one of the good things about music. You get to do it live, where you can touch the people and interact with them.