Duke Ellington Quotes

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

I just loved classical music, but I also loved playing rock guitar, and I loved playing piano, so it was a natural thing that those things would merge at some point.

I've been criticized for doing so - crossover music. But I never claimed to be a pure dancehall artist.

When we started Poco, we were too country for rock, and we were too rock for country.

We have such a mixture now, such a fusion of different genres.

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.

There's no borders or lines you can't cross anymore. Everything is getting blended with everything. That's the dope thing about music now. Some people don't like it, more of the older people. They want to, you know, go back to old-school New York hip-hop.

A significant event for me was learning Hank Williams, reconnecting with his music's simplicity, which inspired me to inhabit the same territory. It's different, because I grew up on Led Zeppelin, The Stooges and punk, so in that sense I'm mutating country and folk more than a few degrees.

To break R&B into subcategories does a disservice to the music. I like to live in a zone where I can do whatever I want, where I don't have to worry about genre.

We have been trying to play a lot of different kinds of music, and probably the next album will go back more towards the direction where you couldn't classify each song as a certain kind of music. This album you can.

Music is music; you don't have to put a label on it.

Where do you even draw the line between genres?

The folk music definition has changed in this fast music world and musical styles are blending really quickly.

I don't like putting a name on my music. It's not just country and rap; it's got Southern rock, classic rock.

I think right now, you've seen these artists pop up over the last decade who've flirted with branching together a lot of different kinds of music. Some of them have been huge, and sold millions of records. And I think over time it's become a little bit of what the industry can be.

Dance music is like a virus: it has affected so many different genres.

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.

In America, music is more tightly categorized.

In the future I think the labels on most pop music are going to go. Everyone keeps jumping into everyone else's space.

I don't limit my taste. There's some jazz that I like and there's some opera. I've been listening to what was essentially country music, but it crossed over to rock.

I keep my hip-hop as hip-hop, my R&B as R&B and my pop as pop. The ability to cross those boundaries and do all these things effectively is not commonly done.

I don't like the idea of 'classical crossover,' even if sometimes I see this category given to what I'm doing.

I think I have a different view of what pop is and what can be acceptable in that realm. I feel good about that. I want fans to see that not everything's so black and white with genres.

I like the idea of blending genres.

Country is and always will be my heart, but I don't have a problem with it spilling over into pop if it wants to.