Rhiannon Giddens Quotes

I'm just trying to make my favorite music. That's how I work; I just do things based on the way they feel to me. I want to be touched by the music I'm making. Luckily, other people have shared that response to my work over the years.

I've learned how much of an impact that music has on people. I get messages all the time from people telling me what my music means to them and what it has done to them.

When you look into the eyes of your people out there that came to see you, that's when it's like, 'Yep, this is what it's all about.' This is why we don't sleep, and this is why we write songs and try to be the best. This moment right here onstage.

If someone is sad, they put on a song, or if someone wants to rock out, and they want to get into a good mood, they put on music. Just being able to be a part of something like that I feel like was my ultimate push to do music.

Nothing is more rewarding than to take a song, create it out of thin air and then watch it affect people.

A musician cannot move others unless he too is moved. He must of necessity feel all of the affects that he hopes to arouse in his audience, for the revealing of his own humour will stimulate a like humour in the listener.

If you're an artist, you want to draw from real life; you want to draw from experiences, emotion, and it's something that a lot of musicians juggle with. I've always found it so fascinating.

You leave part of yourself on every stage you're on. How could you not live in the air somehow?

When I got into art school, I thought it was paradise. I wanted to be an artist so much that I was really driven and nothing could stop me.

Sometimes you read a script, and you just think, 'Wow, I would love to go and tell that story, and I don't even care what happens to the film, I would just love that experience.' And often, that mentality makes a great film.

When an audience is affected in a way that I've seen with some people, it's so inspiring to me an actor. You know that you're on the right track and you're doing work that can affect people. When that goes hand-in-hand with important issues that we're still living with, and we will be for a long time, sadly, it's so confirming of everything.

Why an artist loves what they do is often so hard to describe.

Every time I perform or sing, I have an 'ah ha' moment. When I look at my blog and people reach out to me anonymously and speak of how I sing and how my music has touched them, it's an 'ah ha' moment. I'm constantly getting that, and I don't want that to ever stop, because it's reassuring me that I'm doing something right.

Some people get turned on by my work, and it sells, but what drives me is the process of making it.

It is said an artist spends their whole life trying to get to the place where their heart was first opened up. 'Rent' was that place for me.

How many millions of times have I sung 'Love Changes Everything?' But when I see how it matters to people, it gives me the impetus to rediscover it and remember how lucky I am to have a song like that.

I'm just glad to be singing songs that touch people.

Once you see how powerful music is and how it can affect people, then you want to use it to impact the world.

What is important is satiating my creativity as an artiste.

I collect art like other people eat pizza. I can't get enough of it. I need a constant source of inspiration.

As much as you act like everything is programmed or calculated or researched or numbers, spins, radio, and clubs, it's still human beings out here you can reach with music.

Look out! Be on your guard, because alone of all the arts, music moves all around you.

It's funny, now that we have Twitter and Facebook and stuff, you can really see how you affect fans. Before all that, fans couldn't tell you exactly how they feel, unless they came up after a show, and even then you can't stand there and talk to everybody in the audience. So it's nice to see people tweet me and say, "Your music has changed my life," or "I had my baby to your music," or "I got married to your music." I've heard so many things, and it's amazing to hear people's stories and how you affect their life.

For me my biggest inspiration is trying to make music that effects me as much as the music made by my heroes.

Twenty-seven people sang 'Wind Beneath My Wings' before I got around to it. A lot of people saw the movie that I sang it in, Beaches, and what they came away with was that song. They turned to their loved ones and said, 'You know, you are the wind beneath my wings!' The song expressed how they felt in a way a simple 'I love you' would not have.