CeeLo Green Quotes

We don't need another Woody. Even Bob Dylan knew he couldn't be Woody Guthrie... I like Woody Guthrie fine, but I don't need the 50th generation version of it.

In other words, musicians know that going back to the Spoonful, what we were doing was not copying.

I definitely respect the men and women who came before me and how much those people gave to me musically.

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 many sounds of Memphis shaped my early musical career and continue to be an inspiration to this day.

When I went to Memphis and Mississippi and Nashville, I learnt the blues is a whole way of life. I don't really have the blues, but I can appreciate the honesty and the simplicity of it.

When I first became aware of music, it was probably the same way a lot of people do - even more suburban or rural people - from my older brothers playing music.

I'm becoming hip to my children because bands of their generation name us as influences, so you can definitely hear it, the same way as we were influenced by other people.

I don't get so much inspiration from other musicians. Especially alive musicians. Late musicians are good - Bach, Beethoven - yes, good.

Raphael Saadiq said to me, quite often, that Chuck D was his history teacher. And so he got a lot from the music, things that he wasn't getting maybe in school. And I feel the same way with regards to Earth, Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder.

I feel like I have to create the Keith Whitley sound. That doesn't mean I can't borrow from the people I grew up listening to, but it doesn't serve any purpose to sing the same kind of songs they sang. When you do that, it's going to come out sounding like an imitation, whether it's meant to or not.

I'm not an original composer. The tunes are not stolen from other tunes necessarily except in a few cases, but they're in the style of songs that I grew up with.

A lot of people are really quick to say, "That song sounds like this." Or you - "He's tryin' to sound like this." And I'm always like, "You're damn right I am. That's how - that's why we're all here." You know, we all grew up idolizing another musician. That's how this works. That's how music is created.

I learned from my uncle that jazz, like symphony music, was built to last.

My dad played music so I was around it at a really young age.

I know when somebody's heard my music. I can hear it in their music.

I've gotta stick to my roots, and my roots are blues.

My dad's music was a great inspiration to me.

I remember working with Ray Charles when I was quite young, and I would wonder, 'Why would he sing 'Georgia On My Mind' and 'I Can't Stop Loving You' every night?' I said, 'Oh my God if I have to sing these songs, if I have to sing 'I Can't Stop Loving You' one more night, I'm going to fall out.' Of course, I was young and I didn't understand.

I try to steal something from the great singers. Of course, I don't want to imitate their sound, but I try to do a sort of compromise.

The name Van Halen, the family legacy, is going to go on long after I'm gone.

I get to study and I got to mimic and what I basically did was I stole from every person that I could steal from. I was an imitator. That's what I was. It was years before I could take all of these things that I loved about all of these different artists and put them together and find my voice.

Before I left, I opened a lot of doors for a lot of people to play the blues.

My father was always playing this ethnic blues stuff around the house, and both my parents played. Then one day my father brought home Big Bill Broonzy, and there he was sitting in our living room playing, and blues was in my heart from the time I was 12 years old.

There's a lot of music at my fingertips that I can be influenced by. And just because I play a horn, I don't need to sound, or try to capture, what was happening before me. I can just respect it and learn from it.