Nina Simone Quotes

I had to make a drastic change at Sun Records and I didn't really appreciate country music until I went there.

I started taking singing classes just two years ago. It was great. I never knew I could sing but I kind of found my voice.

I lived deep in the country in northern Wisconsin. I didn't have any neighbors or anything, so in the summers, I played guitar for hours and hours every day until I was about 18. I never thought about combining it with drag, 'cause to me, well, drag queens don't play guitar. Now I'm like, 'You idiot, that's an opportunity.'

When I wanted to be a music teacher, I wanted to help people through voice. Now, I get to help people out through song.

She was twenty and had come to realize that, though she had a voice, she wasn't a singer; that to endure and embrace the life of a singer demands a whole lot more than a voice.

Sing!" Grandpa Smedry yelled, his voice echoing down a hallway to the right."Sing!" If he breaks into song I think I might have to strangle myself... I thought, cringing.

I'm just a one-instrument player. I have been known to play a blender, but I basically play - just play the violin.

Today's folk song is rock and roll. Although it happened to emanate from America, that's not really important in the end because we wrote our own music and that changed everything.

Raydiation is more mature, reveals more about me personally and focuses on singing and songs that people can relate to.

If I only have ten minutes, Sam, this is what I want to say. You're not the best of us. You're more than that. You're better than all of us. If I only have ten minutes, I would tell you to go out there and live. I'd say...please take your guitar and sing your songs to as many people as you can. Please fold a thousand more of those damn birds of yours. Please kiss that girl a million times.

My truth is relevant and my songs are relevant, but I have to recalibrate myself and speed up my vibrations so that I can communicate with the voice of this generation.

I like all the kinds of music I've been into. I'm certainly not a purist in that I will only play country licks in a country song or blues licks in blues stuff. The thing I would like to be able to do is to make the music sound right no matter what it is. If somebody else wants to have a label for it, then that's their business.

Singing is near miraculous because it is the mastering of what is otherwise a pure instrument of egotism: the human voice.

A guitarist or a drummer can get a cold and still play; I get a cold and sound like a wet mitten trying to sing you a love song. Charming.

If I could play an instrument, it would probably be a cello or an electric guitar.

When I first organized the King Cole Trio back in 1937, we were strictly what you would call an instrumental group. To break the monotony, I would sing a few songs here and there between the playing. I sang things I had known over the years. I wasn't trying to give it any special treatment, just singing. I noticed thereafter people started requesting more singing, and it was just one of those things.

Sadly I don't sing. I missed it for a long time, but my daughter Emma said something wonderful when I was feeling blue one day: "Mom, you've just found a different way of using your voice, and that's with your books." In a way, she's right. It's just a different way of expressing what I feel about music, individuality, art and all the things I've always loved.

If you thought Stairway to Heaven was a long song, dear god you should listen to it played on a lute.

I've always been a fan of the band setting. I've always been a believer in bands, and I've always been in bands. That's where my comfort zone is. So to stand outside of that, that was never my intention or goal. I never had the dream of, 'I'm gonna go into all these bands as a spring board for my solo work.' But life takes you on different journeys sometimes. I ended up playing a bunch of songs and some of them I really liked.

I want to make great songs.

I think my favorite medium is music, with my main tools being my voice and a guitar. But I do find every other medium extremely fulfilling and useful in helping everything I do. Sometimes I need to make a song just for a comic. All of the art and mediums are connected for me.

I had more of a vocal range. If you wanted to play a keyboard song, like "Love Walks In," I can do it.

I used to be a folk singer, but I was... dreadful. I had a voice like a goose farting in the fog.

Denice Franke is a sensitive and compelling singer and songwriter.

God is infinitely creative, and everyone's different, and everyone has a different path, a different lesson, a different song, a different face, a different voice.