Laura Mvula Quotes

Write your own songs. It helps you to mean what you're singing, which will then make it mean something to listeners.

I don't think songs have to be like these super-#1-smash-hit-sounding songs, because I think it's more important that it's like, 'Hey! This is coming out of me. This is something I connect with. This is something that I like to sing.'

Singing and being truthful to a song... I've developed that skill, and I know how to do that real instinctively, that's all I've been doing for the last 25 years.

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

I just want to write fun, interesting music that pushes boundaries and is still true to myself. I want people to feel something.

There's a lot of vulnerability in songs - I'm not talking about pop songs - from people that are in the art of songwriting more than the commercial enterprise of it.

I'm very comfortable singing myself, first of all. Secondly, there's a certain disconnect when you write the song and you have someone else sing it for you. And it's kind of like a fakeness about it.

I'm not going to make a song just to make a song. The day that I make an album, it's so that people really know what Bad Bunny's about.

I've done bits of writing for other people but when I'm writing music as Years & Years, I'm using my life and my stories and my experiences. I want it to be authentic and real but also to work as a pop song - I never want to just put in a cheesy line.

Because of things like 'The X Factor' and 'Autotune', the real art of communicating a song is not treasured any more. But singing other people's songs can be an intensely personal experience. I want the songs to be vessels that people fill with their own imagination, the same way that I fill it with my thoughts and feelings.

I really wanted a No. 1 single from my first album, but I would not do anything different. It was real and honest and I didn't pretend anything.

The best career advice was to sing with an understanding and internalise the music - that was my mother's advice. Sing with intention, believe what it is you're saying, and think about it, before you sing it.

If you pretend to be somebody that you're not when you write songs - and I did that on some of the early Styx albums - nobody cares about what you have to say.

I wouldn't start writing songs like 'Name' all the time just because I thought that's what people wanted to hear. I'll write a song in the same vein because it's what I want to write.

When directors tell me they want a song like one, I tell them no song should be like another. I don't listen to directors.

I love writing songs, but I don't want to write the songs everyone else is asking me to write.

I'm glad that people realize that I am a songwriter. I just want them to take away the fact that I'm honest, and that I'm putting in work on the sonic side.

I express myself better when I'm singing, so I always want to hold on to the music side.

My process of songwriting comes from a very real place: a place that when you watch 'American Idol' - God bless it, it's probably an awesome experience that these people are having, but it's not a real one.

I want to create music that moves me, not just music that is going to get me famous or make someone at a label happy.

I want to relate. I don't want to just rap and go to the next album.

I just sit down and write the best song for the best moment, and however it comes out, it is what it is.

I've never really been afraid of how people were going to define me, as long as I didn't write some cheaper song because people like that I'm depressed.

Writing from a personal experience can bring about this emotion and power of emotion that can be instantly connected to the instrument, my voice.

I started music to be myself - to release and express - so I have to make sure that I'm staying true to me and making myself happy.