Jello Biafra Quotes

I love the pioneers like Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, but when I write music, it comes out in my own way.

I'm a mash-up of everyone. My influences would be Michael Jackson, Brandy, Aaliyah - those types of people. So if you can imagine them - and with me taking them, and then putting my own twist and the influence on it - that's musically what I would sound like.

My voice is a combination of how I grew up and what I was listening to growing up. I like a lot of different kinds of music and am always being inspired in different ways by different artists for different reasons.

I think Sia is a pretty good reference for me because her way of 'singing and the way she composes the melodies and writes the lyrics is very similar to what I've always done.

I'm always gonna have the darker edgy music; it is always in my pocket because it comes so naturally to me.

I've always sort of felt like what the Shins is, I guess, is a vehicle for my writing.

If you are speaking about my own songs, I would think so because we were talking about that particular era and I was singing one of my songs that I recorded 50 years ago.

Every time I tried writing my own songs, they would come out very country. I couldn't fight it, and the more I listened to country music, the more I loved it, and it just became very natural.

The music I want to hear in my head sounds somewhere between Jimi Hendrix and Massive Attack. It's not really like my dad, but there will always be similarities because we have the same vocal cords, and I learnt the guitar the way he taught me.

I wanted to give people a taste of my own music through the sound and style of my covers.

It's true, there's a lot of melancholy in my music. I don't know why, I'm not a melancholy person. I've always been drawn to it. Ever since I was a kid, if I had an album I would play the ballads on repeat.

I don't like the idea of a singer-songwriter record. I don't picture myself that way, and it's not my favorite sort of look, I guess. It's really just an aesthetic thing.

I felt Michael Jackson was inspired a little bit more from the elegance of a Fred Astaire. Michael loved Sammy Davis, Jr. and James Brown and Judy Garland and Fred Astaire. But he wasn't any of those people. To be inspired is one thing, but he made it all his own.

What I'm doing is basically the same as Bob Dylan did with folk songs and Woody Guthrie songs, the same as folk music's always done. I'm not going to sing about ploughing, but I'll write a song that sounds like it should be about ploughing.

I didn't want to go out and change anything. I just wanted to make the music that was part of my background, which was rock and blues and hip-hop.

My music is - I don't want to say my main focus, but it's what comes most naturally to me.

The music I write, I feel, is not the kind of music for a 25-year-old.

I feel like I have to create the Keith Whitley sound. That doesn't mean I can't borrow from the people I grew up listening to, but it doesn't serve any purpose to sing the same kind of songs they sang. When you do that, it's going to come out sounding like an imitation, whether it's meant to or not.

We stand on our songs and we stand on the songs that we wrote for other people. That gives us a higher platform.

You know, somebody mentioned that I was sort of a jazz-pop singer. And I'm thrilled that somebody would find that, at last, in my presentation, because it's such a part of where I live.

I'm not just a singer-songwriter doing songs in the key of me.

I've been trying to challenge myself to be more explicit. I've always liked punk rock and Sonic Youth. I make that music privately, but I've never released it.

I'm a country singer. I love all kinds of music, but country is where my loyalty lies. That's just me and what I do, and I'm not going to change it.

I found a certain kind of music congenial to me; it never occurred to me to write music that was academically acceptable.

I feel that through my father's music I've found my own voice in my own playing.