Kelela Quotes

Most people say, 'Well, Earl, you sing the blues,' or however they want to categorize it. I just sing songs.

Actually, if I could deliberately sit down and write a pop hit, all my songs would be pop hits! Let's put it this way. I play what I like to hear. And sometimes I like to hear something poppy, and sometimes I don't.

I listen to the Mars Volta and Fiona Apple every day. I feel if you do write music, you write what you listen to, and you couldn't possibly write in another genre. So those are the two that I usually use.

Honest, I listen to classical mostly. It keeps my mind fresh to write rock songs.

You can go down the list of great artists and kind of understand that they are products of their environment. Whether it's U2 or Henry Rollins or myself or Johnny Lydon, they're gonna be products of their environment.

I wasn't making it with the violin because I was playing all of the 'long hair' stuff.

The way I perceive an album to sound and the way I put out mixtapes are two different energies. There's a different focus; there's a different sound.

For me, writing a song, I sit down and the process doesn't really involve me thinking about the demographic of people I'm trying to hit or who I want to be able to relate to the song or what genre of music it falls under.

A lot of our earlier material was freestyle tunes.

Just because I front the band or we play bigger stages now, it doesn't mean we somehow suddenly changed the way we approach things. We all still view what we do as indie and alternative in terms of how we execute it, even if the actual music we make is more pop than our previous projects.

The identity of each band is what's important for me production-wise.

I don't think a song should be put in a category.

Roja,' 'Bombay' and 'Dil Se' weren't planned as political films. It was a phase India was going through and these things affected me and found their way into my work.

When I started making songs, some of them read as mixtape-y, and some of them read as album-y.

I don't really feel like a rock artist, but I guess in the small category of the world of music genres, that's where I fall in because I've got a guitar.

So yeah, it's nothing that I'm doing on purpose, I just think that the more records, the more songs that I write, the more records that I make, you're obviously going to fall into a specific style and thank God it's a style that people are into.

I can't stand any music that requires its singers to be so dumb they wear their baseball caps backwards.

I had been working purely abstractly for so long, it was important for me to see whether I was working abstractly because I couldn't work any other way, or whether I was doing it out of choice.

I just put out a hardcore double album. Next I'm gonna put out an introspective album.

My music is kind of laid back, it doesn't have super crispy, shiny production, and I'm not singing my heart out or whatever. But that whole idea of blogs declaring: "this is the new denomination for this sound" is ridiculous to me.

I've been a jazz artist playing pop and R&B my entire career.

A novel is really like a symphony where instrument after instrument has to come in at its own time, and no other.

Take a dose of rock and roll, and wash it down with cool clear soul.

If I write songs and I think they sound good, then that's it. That's what I do. I'm not a technical musician, which is fine for rock and roll.

This is rock'n'roll, not classical music. It's about people working together.