Paula Cole Quotes

I dont ever want to do anything mediocre. I hear the music in the charts and I dont mean to be rude, but those people have no soul. Learning from music is like eating a meal - you have to pace yourself. You cant take everything from it all at once. I want to be different, definitely. Im not a one trick pony. Im at least a five-trick pony.

It's become uncool to play other people's songs, and that's absurd. It has got to change. It's the reason why everything's so mediocre.

I've never believed in cheapening music by going according to what some people think is public taste.

If one uses music that one does not really love, then one will not succeed in making it one's own.

Lyrically we tried to just not be the same as a lot of the other crap that is out there right now.

I do not like people writing songs and then other people singing them. A lot of people don't even sing their own songs anymore. It's like producers these days have ghost producers; 'I don't produce, but I am a producer.'

David Lee Roth had the idea that if you covered a successful song, you were half way home. C'mon - Van Halen doing 'Dancing in the Streets'? It was stupid. I started feeling like I would rather bomb playing my own songs than be successful playing someone else's music.

No one can make the album they made 10 years ago with a straight face. There are two reasons: one is you change as a person. To be a true artist, I have to be true to who I am now and write that way. And the second thing is these are different times.

You shouldn't be in the music business if you're posing.

I would rather write or record something great and have it overlooked than do mediocre work and have it be popular.

I'd rather have people really be able to step back and get their money's worth and look at me as a true artist than somebody who is just regurgitating other material.

I don't need a sensationalized headline to sell music or to bring attention to my music. It's the music and it's always been about the music.

Learn your instrument. Be honest. Don't do anything phony. There is so much crap floating around. There is plenty of room for a bit of honest writing.

Don't try to follow any trends, just concentrate on writing great songs and knowing your instrument. All the other stuff will fall into place.

I love the fact that no one's ever bought my record because they were enamoured of the way I look. Maybe one person. There must be someone out there with compromised taste.

What is nice about country music today is that most artists are not trying to do something everybody else is doing. They really are trying to develop their own uniqueness.

I would rather write something that's authentic to me than something that'll be likely to get played on the radio but doesn't have any substance to it. People can see through that really quickly.

What I can't understand is why people still won't give me the credibility that I look for. If Mojo or any other of those magazines would give me the credit for only ever performing my own songs rather than someone like Rod Stewart singing other people's songs looking for success.

We don't want to become like country artists where there's a formula.

I'm glad that people realize that I am a songwriter. I just want them to take away the fact that I'm honest, and that I'm putting in work on the sonic side.

I'll never put out some super-dumbed-down music. It'll always have some substance to it.

In my music, I'm never going to force anything to try to recreate a moment or something.

I get so frustrated with all these so-called singer-songwriters coming out and they don't write!

I feel like a lot of the singer-songwriters in my genre and in my generation have gotten more and more snooty about covering other people's songs. They believe that creativity is the intersect of expression.

The music business is really, really small. The real music is becoming almost extinct, if you don't stay true to who you are.