Valerie Simpson Quotes

The Beatles and Ray Charles were in the same charts together, and that was just called pop music - it wasn't called soul or rock. The best pop music just stands out as something that's just original, and I think it should all be called pop again.

It's a really diverse time in music, with all these different DJs and all these different categories, and we are all taking footnotes from everyone else. There are no real genre boundaries anymore; you can take a trance idea and put it into a trap record - it's not that uncommon.

What I'm trying to do is break the genre from what is rap and what is music.

Superficial pop will always exist - there've always been Fabians - but when people like Dire Straits and Bruce Hornsby start having hits, it suggests that there's a revolution going on in music.

People don't listen to one radio station. On iTunes you can mix different worlds and bring country and pop and folk and live music together with a mass audience. I could have sung 'Easy' in a country way but I just sang it how I sing. I think it's a really nice blend.

Even for the people in the business who are real music lovers it's really about putting things in the right boxes, and my style doesn't fit into a box.

I don't see that there are any particular changes in popular music.

All that stuff about heavy metal and hard rock, I don't subscribe to any of that. It's all just music. I mean, the heavy metal from the '70s sounds nothing like the stuff from the '80s, and that sounds nothing like the stuff from the '90s. Who's to say what is and isn't a certain type of music?

I think Ray Charles did as much as anybody when he did his country music album. Ray Charles broke down borders and showed the similarities between country music and R&B.

I criticized the whole American songwriting industry and the pop side of it and I was bitter about it. And I stepped back and thought 'Why are you bitter? You can't just stand there like every other indie musician and criticize this so-called 'generic' music when you're not doing anything to challenge that.'

Rap is always evolving. It's easy for the old school to hate the new school, but it's a music that got a little stifled I think, by the Internet a little bit.

In America, music is more tightly categorized.

I'm still looking for the rules of what is and isn't pop music. I'm pop. I mean, of course I am. What isn't pop? There should be a pop amnesty where everyone reclaims it.

For me, the '80s was great because you had Boy George, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Prince, and Cyndi Lauper. No one put boxes saying this is urban, this is popular, this is underground. It was just good or bad.

I love all types of music, and I think the genre lines are starting to get thinner every year.

In 1965, when great young white artists in the English-speaking world were successfully re-channeling hillbilly and black music - you know Bob Dylan, Ray Davies, Pete Townsend, Keith Richards - they didn't get any money at first. They were all broke.

When I lived in Nashville, Tanya Tucker and people like that were coming up, and I'm sure that Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette were going, 'What's that noise? That's not country.' It's always been this battle where whoever comes up behind the reigning stars isn't country enough. There really is a lot more crossover now.

Normally, things are viewed in these little segmented boxes. There's classical, and then there's jazz; romantic, and then there's baroque. I find that very dissatisfying. I was trying to find the thread that connects one type of music - one type of musician - to another, and to follow that thread in some kind of natural, evolutionary way.

The whole world has changed much since the '80's. In the united States, rap music and country music dominate radio and that certainly wasn't the case in the early '80's.

There's more good music being made now than ever before.

I don't like the word 'urban' because I think it's a bit of a generalisation and they use it to class music, but I don't think it's a word that necessarily classes music.

Genre boundaries are good for marketing but they all but disappear when you're a player.

My sisters and I like a lot of different styles of music, but we're inspired by real artists like Beyonce and Adele.

I happened to come along in the music business when there was no trend.

In 2010, aside from that niche of music that I have no interest in - Black Eyed Peas territory, disposable pop stuff - there's almost an incentive to go back to making music as adventurous and groundbreaking as you can, because nobody gets a big hit anymore.