D'Angelo Quotes

I don't just sing R&B: I'm able to sing pop and play with other sounds, but it's all real soulful.

My favorite artists always documented emotion. Marvin Gaye and Al Green and Sade and Aaliyah.

I like Stevie Wonder as my favorite non-pianist pianist. I mean, I shouldn't call him a non-pianist, because he's really a great pianist, but he doesn't feature it that much - he uses his keyboards and his piano technique to support his great songs and so forth, but he can really blow.

I drew a lot of inspiration from the Ginuwines, the Ushers, the Michael Jacksons, the James Browns, Sam Cooke.

I'm fascinated by male vulnerability.

I like the fact that I have the power to convey a lot of emotion through my songs. I like to channel that when I'm singing. I think it's just a mix of R&B, soul, but then I kind of move more into the pop world and electronic pop and stuff like that.

Prince got some Marvin Gaye and Jimi Hendrix and Sly in him, also, even Little Richard. He's a mixture of all those guys and Duke Ellington.

You can still be a man and have an emotional side.

The Isley Brothers, there's a group that stays together because they're a family band.

I'm an old spirit, and my voice tends to be kind of heavy and loud. I've been referenced as 'a young Aretha.'

I was inspired by James Brown, Michael Jackson and Prince.

Boys don't cry. But they do. We do. I do. I weep all the time.

I like to sing R&B slow jams. It's always been my thing.

The ghetto music of my era is hip-hop. And Parliament, and Curtis Mayfield, and Marvin Gaye, that was all the ghetto stuff when I was a baby, and then when I was a teenager it was hip-hop and we were taking all those old '70s sounds and recreating them and putting them into a hip-hop format.

I'm listening to a lot of oldies.A lot of Al Green, Marvin Gaye. Luther Vandross... they were some of my icons.

We had some Stevie Wonder and Luther Vandross, but there's a lot of hip-hop and other black music that I just never grew up on. My parents didn't listen to anything other than black gospel.

'Uptown Funk' has all the ingredients of the funk that I love.

I say that I do soul, R&B music. I have so many influences, from Billie Holiday, Nina Simone to Stevie Wonder and Prince and even Al Green and Bjork. And a lot of hip hop music has influenced me a lot - you know - De La Soul and Digital Underground and A Tribe Called Quest.

The guys that I look up to - Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder - were always in touch with an emotion that is familiar to every man: the emotion of love for a woman. That's what I do.

Crying is scary to men! To us, it's a sign that something completely earth-shattering is happening.

A lot of people at the highest level, I never listened to. It was hard for me to listen to a whole lot of stuff. It didn't get there for me. Al Green, who's maybe my favorite male singer - to me, Al Green sounds like a saxophone player.

I'm under no illusion. There are lots of male singers out there with raspy voices.

I love The Isley Brothers.

I don't know if it's because I grew up in Beverly or my friends, but I listened to a lot of alternative rock music. I loved Incubus, Weezer and Jimmy Eat World. It almost felt segregated because I loved all of those acts over here, but then I also loved R&B and soul music I grew up with.

If I do something related to English music, it will be definitely in the direction of R&B and pop.