Neneh Cherry Quotes

I don't want people to just hand me music and be like, 'Here, you sound good on this. Sing it.' I want to be able to say, 'This is me.'

Honestly, I never felt like I wasn't an artist on my own. I always felt like the music I made was mine, whether it was part of a collaboration with people.

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.

Playing the piano is incredibly personal... But when it's your own piece, it's doubly so.

Yeah, I've always sung, and I always try to find a way for music to be in my life.

I understand it's my role to realize people's dreams. I'm O.K. with that so long as my songs are my own. No one can take my songs away from me.

Until you learn to play what you want to hear, you're barking up the wrong tree.

When you write a song you have an idea of how it should be sung but it doesn't work out that way if someone else records it.

But the greatest thing about music is putting it out there for people to figure out. You want the listener to find the song on their own. If you give too much away, it takes away from the imagination.

I'm coming into places with some people who just want to hear what I did before, with some people who want to hear me with a band, but I am just at the moment sticking to my guns and saying, 'You know what? I want you just to hear this for a minute. I want it to be in the context of me and a guitar.'

Singers, like Frank Sinatra and myself, we interpret the songs that we like. Not unlike a Shakespearean actor that goes back to the greatest words ever written, we go back to the greatest songs and bring about my interpretation of them.

People take songs so literally.

I've accepted the fact that Limp Bizkit is my band, one that I'm a part of, a band that I've built from the beginning. It does me no good to be in somebody else's band playing their music, like Marilyn Manson or Korn. Being in Limp Bizkit allows me to be myself.

Music has nothing to do with your technical ability.

You can say what you think music is, but the only way it really is, is how people experience it.

I'm not the best singer, but I like the way I sing my songs.

I felt I never needed to fight for a more prominent songwriting and increased vocal role with the Cars.

As a songwriter you have an umbilical cord to the song and it's hard to expand on your understanding of the lyrics. Whereas when you cover a song you can create your own reason why you're attached to it.

Maybe it's egocentric or whatever, but when I'm playing Beethoven, Bach, Hendrix, or whoever it is, in the end, it just feels like my own music and I'm making it up as I'm going along.

If I write for myself, I write a song and I bring in the musicians that are best suited to play it. There's a freedom there.

My voice isn't an instrument I can just hang up on a hook.

As a singer, you have to bring the soul to the song.

I can't even read music. All I know is whether I think it sounds good and if I like what I'm doing.

I don't like to talk too much about my music; I like people to just experience it and not worry what I have to say.

I think that the whole point of music is that there shouldn't be rules. There is no right or wrong. And the fact that I may not like that piece of music and you may... The validation is in the fact that somebody gets something from it.