Mat Kearney Quotes

For the last three years, I've been working on 'Bromst,' and that's all that encompassed my brain. And now that it's out, it will change the way that I think musically.

When I was 19, I joined a rock band, and that's when I began to say, 'Okay, this is something that I could take seriously.' When I came to Minneapolis, it just refined everything.

'Cause I felt I didn't have anything else to prove as a musician... and boy was I wrong about that one.

My songwriting has evolved, just as I've evolved as a person.

Yeah, I put out some goofy stuff. I had no idea who I was as an artist at all before 'Posse on Broadway.'

I'm a late bloomer in music.

I didn't start singing and writing songs properly until I was 19.

As a working musician, your first instinct is to try and do your job. It wasn't always my aspiration to sing; I just wanted to be a great working musician. But then Flying Lotus suggested I try, and nothing has ever been the same since.

You're always in a different headspace when you make each record, so hopefully they're all different. You just pick up things that you wish you hadn't done on the first one.

When I first decided I wanted to make beats and write songs and stuff like that, it wasn't like I sat down and the first thing I wrote was even halfway legit. It took a while to find my way through it.

I've explored the worship side, the pop side, and the film scoring side of me.

I started writing seriously about 1960, at the fairly advanced age of 30.

I'm having fun just being a musician as well as an artist at this point.

I feel like I always describe myself as a late bloomer. My first album, in my mind, was that I had a few songs I needed to take from incomplete demos to working with someone else and finishing them.

I really think I've found me finally in the music. You know, I had put an album out before, 'Embrace Me,' and it's been seven years since that. So I was discovering who I was. And I still am discovering, but I think now I know a little bit more of who I am. So that's what's pushing me.

I was determined to create my own identity. My first hits, in fact, were straight-up rhythm and blues. My voice was compared to Aretha Franklin's - though, for my money, no one compares to Aretha.

After I left Texas and went to California, I had a hard time getting anyone to play anything that I was writing, so I had to end up playing them myself. And that's how I ended up just being a saxophone player.

I was a cover artist for years. I didn't start writing songs until I was in my mid-twenties. I wrote them with John Leventhal, and they were pretty bad. I was in my late twenties when I wrote the first song with him that made any sense to me about what I was rooted in and what spoke for me as an artist. That was 'Diamond in the Rough.'

I feel like my music has become a lot of things. It's hard to label the evolution, but I like there to be an evolution. I just like to paint with all different kinds of colors.

In high school, I would secretly play Joni Mitchell songs all the time. That's when I started singing and playing at the same time, and I got really into doing that.

One of the biggest misconceptions was, after I left Dream Theater, I went off and did, like, five different bands and side projects. Everyone was like, 'We thought you wanted a break.' And it was like, well, I didn't want a break from making music; I just needed a break from the Dream Theater camp.

Everyone has their own journey, and for me, going from singing background to writing songs has truly opened doors for me and has also helped me find myself as an artist in terms of what I want to say and the style of music I want to have.

'99.9%' is the end product of years and years of me going through multiple styles and interests.

I don't really know how to describe how I got into music - it kind of just happened.

I have a soft spot for 'Wind of Change' because it was my first one, and it was a departure from Humble Pie - very much so. It showed me the spectrum of what I could do.