Angie Martinez Quotes

My work is intensely personal.

I just worked my own personal thoughts into my music, and just kept at it until I found a way in.

The individual - man as a man, man as a brain, if you like - interests me more than what he makes because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

I saw I could rhyme words. It came simply to me. But I wrote some pretty horrible songs that I still have on tape.

It's really such a personal journey, making a record, but even more so writing the songs.

On 'Heartbreaker,' I had to sing those songs. I drank the way I did those songs. I ate the way I did those songs. I communicated the way I did those songs. With 'Gold,' I was trying to prove something to myself. I wanted to invent a modern classic.

When I do my collection, it is in a way my own story.

It never gets boring for me because there's so many different things to explore in the studio. The studio's become the sanctuary that people have come in and found new things out about themselves, as weird as that sounds. But it's true, I'm no different. I've made some crazy hard records, and I've made a jazz album.

When I first started making music, I didn't really know what I was doing. I just wanted to write songs. I didn't have a concept. I didn't think it through. I was just flailing around doing what comes naturally. It took me a really long time to step back and deal with what I was doing with any kind of perspective or self-awareness.

I can look back over my earlier music, and it takes me back to the place I was emotionally.

When I was in school, I really thought about soul a lot. I was listening a lot to Bjork and to the Commodores. I really wanted to know how they felt. And especially with Bjork, the music there told me wow, that's really her soul there.

I mean, if you decided to go out today and get you an instrument and do whatever it is that you do, no one can tell you how you're going to do it but when you do it.

With every role that I do, I always see a little bit of me, a little bit of art and life.

There's an amazing power that music has, and it definitely had its power over me as a boy. I just saw fit to keep exploring it.

I've been adjusting to what it means to be a songwriter, figuring out what I like about it and what I don't like about it and what it means to me as opposed to other people.

I view making records as a journey.

All my collections are based on something I like or something I'm dealing with. They are always deeply personal.

To me, music is more like a spiritual seeking that takes one to unknown levels.

My personal life, my musical life, my life as an artist - almost everything has pointed all these little arrows that make up which way I go as a person and what I feel comfortable as my identity.

My only incentive is to write music that changes me, where the process of making it is a discovery and is true in some way, at that moment.

I've retreated to what I was originally, which is an individual songwriter.

As someone whose music is connected to his personal growth, I feel an obligation to follow this muse wherever it leads.

I feel like, for me as an artist, it takes me a while of living with the tracks and living with the body of work to realize what it's all about.

The moving toward one's inner self is a long pilgrimage for a painter. It offers many temporary successes and high points, but impels him on toward the more adequate image.

You know how they say, "Find your voice"? That's your voice, in your pajamas. And it doesn't mean that you're going to publish it or print it or people are going to see you in your pajamas. It just means you are going to construct the foundation in your pajamas, in that voice.