Pharrell Williams Quotes

My songwriting and my style became more complex as I listened, learned, borrowed and stole and put my music together.

It's the coolest part about writing music. I don't know how other people work, but so much is derived from some amalgamation of all these different songs that I love. That's why they jump all over the place.

You can get really left of centre influences in mainstream pop. Michael Jackson and Prince are some of the most progressive artists ever if you actually dissect their songs there's some crazy stuff going on.

Guys like me and Ray Charles, when we was coming up through our days, country music and soul music was just a very thin line between the two.

I never thought that I would be creating my own 'cross-over' genre. What I did was very real and organic. I have worked in so many different styles so it all just came together.

It's not a random chance that we have Alanis Morissette. She didn't evolve out of a null and void. She came from a former template. She borrowed styles and sounds from a very limited set of other artists.

I felt Michael Jackson was inspired a little bit more from the elegance of a Fred Astaire. Michael loved Sammy Davis, Jr. and James Brown and Judy Garland and Fred Astaire. But he wasn't any of those people. To be inspired is one thing, but he made it all his own.

I feel like my peers now are artists like Madonna and the Stones, Michael Jackson and Prince. These are people who were able to take their careers beyond the normal here-today-gone-tomorrow life span.

As a kid, looking at Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, New Edition, the Temptations, Motown, people who I felt were huge artists, they made me wanna do something.

I'm not interested in a rock/jazz fusion.

'Sorry' just fit the bill for the crossover that both Lost Stories and I were attempting to do musically.

My brothers came home with country, jazz, everything... it was always very normal to me to make any type of music. It was possible to fuse all the sounds, so it never sounded confusing to me to mix jazz and dubstep.

That's kinda what happened to me: I listened to jazz, country, R&B, rock 'n' roll. And when I sat down to write a song, I had all these influences comin' through.

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

I feel like we're very lucky in the sense that Dawes can be the kind of band that plays with Bright Eyes or M. Ward but that also plays with Bob Dylan.

If Mozart were around now he would write a killer rock song.

My parents listened to a lot of music when I was really little. They used to listen to people like Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder and I used to be really into that.

Music has always been in my family down to my dad through my uncle. I'm just the next generation, since it's always been around me when I was younger when I looked up to my mom and dad, to Michael Jackson, and B2K was my favorite band growing up.

The biggest misconception about us is that we're just a rock band. We think our music is a cross-section of many genres; a hybrid of what the six of us have grown up on.

Jazz has borrowed from other genres of music and also has lent itself to other genres of music.

I put together the influences of my life in as clear a way as I possibly can, in the same way that Beethoven or Schoenberg or Bach put their influences together.

I spent two years figuring out how I could turn it into something that would satisfy me as a musician but also make some kind of cross-cultural link. I feel that I kind of at least touched on the possibilities of cross-cultural music, but it is a lifetime's work, and I don't profess to be anything other than a novice at it.

My inspiration is R. Kelly, Michael Jackson, and Prince - for the vocals, anyway.

Early inspirations included Michael Jackson, Prince, Stevie Wonder, Donny Hathaway, Marvin Gaye, Lionel Richie... Those were the people I actually wound up studying just to hone my craft.

To me, rock n' roll is rock n' roll. I try to think of it as that. To me, Funkadelic and Metallica exist in the same world.