Kamasi Washington Quotes

I was not ready fresh out of high school to hit the streets of Nashville.

Everybody always thinks you have to move out of the city and go where the music industry is, but it's possible in Louisville, and it's possible anywhere. You just have to believe.

Brooklyn is where I primarily developed. I had an opportunity to make records and perform in clubs here and there, and I started networking with the right people in the right places.

I was always singing but didn't plan on pursuing it seriously. When I got to New York City when I was 18, I started playing in clubs in Brooklyn - I have good friends and devoted fans on the underground scene, but we were playing for each other at that point - and that was it.

I moved to New York to pursue music.

Nobody is going to hand you a music career.

I don't know if i have a 'take' on L.A. The music community is enormous, from the studio musicians to the bands trying to 'make it' to the indie bands... so many bands... it can be overwhelming. But it seems healthy.

The cutthroat avenues of rock 'n' roll, I am fed up with. I don't want anything to do with it.

I wanted to live in Nashville. I wanted to sing country.

I'm from Chicago, I live in Chicago and I wanted very much for the music in Chicago to succeed.

I started playing guitar, like, when I was 17 or so, but where I'm from, you just don't hear about people moving to Nashville and making it. It was such a foreign thing to me. I never knew music was an option for me.

All I could think about was, 'I just wanna blow him away. I wanna make him proud, because I really wanna sign with Timbaland and spend the rest of my career making music with Tim.'

There are plenty of people in the world who have tried to be rock stars and have not gotten there.

When I signed that major-label contract when I was 20 years old. I did it because I wanted to play music for the rest of my life. That's every 20-year-old's dream - to do whatever the hell you want.

I've no grand designs to conquer the music industry, but I'd love to be able to tell my mates that I'm playing in a pub in Camden one night.

I think the first thing you should know is that nobody in country music 'made it' the same way. It's all different. There's no blueprint for success, and sometimes you just have to work at it.

I think that when you're making your way up in the music industry, you have all these heroes and the reasons why they are your heroes. As soon as you get into the industry, your guidelines change a little bit. For me, my heroes now are great people first and great artists second.

I wasn't sure what would happen to me after 'The Voice.' I was just excited to make music.

After the first three or four years of me taking rap seriously, it started to look more promising. I started booking shows and more people were playing my music, so I starting believing this could actually work for me.

I love the story of the guy coming to Nashville and then kind of getting set down and told, 'This is how the town works,' which, I've totally been there. But the coolest thing about 'Out of Style' is it's a song within a song.

There are a lot of Israeli musicians in New York because you want to grow and go onstage, and eventually you have to get out of Israel to do that because there aren't enough places to play.

That's the wonderful thing about picking and choosing who we want to work with, because I've been in situations where I've worked with someone, and they thought they were gonna be on the cover of 'XXL' in two months. I'm like, 'That's not how it works.'

We all kind of dreamed about being musicians, but the narrative around being a musician is it'll never happen to you. It's not something that just happens - one in a million shot - all those things that just make you feel like it'll never happen.

I was still on track to go UNC at Chapel Hill, I had no plans to be a musician. It wasn't even a goal of mine. Then I had this song that blew up and went viral and suddenly I found myself playing shows and having this music career.

My family, particularly my brother, made it possible for me to get into the Punjabi music industry.