James Bay Quotes

I was being categorized as some kind of twangy songwriter. And that's just not how I see myself.

When I first released music, and no one knew what I looked like, I would read comments like: 'I've never heard anything like this before; it's not in a genre.' And then my picture came out six months later: now she's an R&B singer.

It can be a bit frustrating to always get the soft-rock stamp.

Am I R&B because I'm black? Am I pop because I have a song called 'Milkshake'? Or can I just be who the hell I am? Good Lord, people make it seem like we're doing heart transplants here, but we're just making music!

I hate that if you do one style of music or become really well known for that one song, that everything that comes after has to fit that mold.

I tend to not want to put labels or categories on the music, only because people come with preconceived ideas about what they're going to hear, or won't come for this reason.

You know, I am just a musician and I have no idea these days what good and bad is in terms of labels.

I just try to make the best music that I can. People are going to label it whatever they're going to label it.

I think it's always a mistake when you start connecting a band to a personality. You begin to limit what you're able to do.

We don't want to categorize our music. Some people say you need a definite musical direction to give a group visibility.

What I don't like is when people feel like they can box an artist into who they think an artist should be.

I hate genres. I think they're just marketing labels.

You don't pigeonhole yourself, people pigeonhole you. If the world is not at a place yet where it can just be like, "This music is gay and it's music," then it's not my fault that it gets pigeonholed, it's not the people in the band's fault, it's because people won't just let music be music, people who need to put a name on something or to critique something.

I want people to get out of that nasty habit of needing a label. Every genre for each song is different.

I hate how things must be classified. How this is applied to musicians implies that they somehow contrive their products and have studied the demographics of the audience.

I've always tried to stay clear of being labeled, putting a label on what type of music that I make.

Country radio went through a time where they were trying to pigeonhole everybody, and trying to make the gap really narrow, and I think that they've opened that up a little bit.

It's tragic that you can define a whole movement in music by gender alone. People are like, 'Oh, look, another quirky girl.'

Music is in me. I don't have much of a choice. People might listen to one of my songs or come and see my because of my famous last name, but if my music's not good they won't hang around.

Musicians are often asked to answer for an entire culture, or for an entire movement. It's a process of commodification. It becomes packaged and summarized in a word like 'emo' or 'grunge'... or 'folk music.' I think that's just language itself, trying to understand the mysteries of the world.

For some reason I've been labeled that and it's fine, but there are a lot of other artists that sing real traditional stuff, so I don't know why they picked me. That's what I've always done.

Why do we pigeonhole and label an artist? It is a sure way of missing the important, the contradictory, the things that make him or her unique.

Musicians exist independent of any of the marketing terms or the categorization.

There's a stigma attached to 'pop music,' like it's a taboo word. It used to make my skin crawl when people said it, and I'd say, 'I'm not a pop star! I want to be a respected musician!' But I think people have changed the way they think about it.

I think - a lot of times in hip-hop, especially - artists get kind of pigeonholed into being 'the guy,' and it's kind of limiting in a way.