Katie Melua Quotes

As an artist your trajectory just has to keep going up. the thing that subverts your next body of work is the work you've taken before.

People don't tend to notice, but in the past 10 years especially there's been a lot of growth in how I write songs and what goes into them. You can listen to Mountain Goats from 1991 to 2007 and never hear a seventh chord. In 2007 or 2008, I started working on the piano to grow as a songwriter. I started throwing major sevens in and sixes and more interesting stuff.

I think most musicians know if they make the same record twice, even if they say they don't.

Each album we [The Replacements] made was the one we were capable of making and wanted to make at the time. Each one was a progression or, depending on your opinion, a sidestep or tumble forward. I don't know what.

All artists have to do that at a certain point. This shift that has to happen between the initial moment of creation and then the consideration of what has been created.

It's interesting how people who were once fairly radical can become, later in life, kind of conservative, and not just in terms of politics - how, if you're an artist, you can start out being somewhat avant-garde and then end up doing landscapes.

I think it's natural for an artist to explore as they evolve.

Shooting movies has changed, and me too - I have changed. And then, every film I do, something in my mind, my soul, changes. My natural change, I change at the same time as the films, I think.

Our approach makes it so if you hear a said song of ours in 2003 and then you hear it again in 2009 it's probably evolved and changed a good bit, and hopefully for the better.

Everytime we put a record out, we lose people that can't deal with the growth.

When I was a young artist, and I would go look at other artists' career retrospectives, and I was often disappointed with the lack of story line... What was missing to me was the story of where the artist came from and how they got to where they were.

You can't stay the same. If you're a musician and a singer, you have to change, that's the way it works.

The way Yes works is when we have a new member come in, as in Jon Davison, it's appropriate that we see what differences we can get out of a new contributing member in order to keep Yes interesting.

I've done so many hip-hop albums already I got tired of just hip-hop.

There are musicians who go through their lives sort of shedding their skins. For me, I've always felt backward-compatible to Version 1.0.

I'm constantly evolving as a musician.

What happened with reggaeton is that many artists kept recycling the same sound. But there are a lot of reggaeton artists that are still in their prime - like Daddy Yankee - because they've chosen to continue growing, to offer people more than just reggaeton. That's where I learned to always be able to try something new and not be afraid.

What I love about each album is the opportunity to expand on what we've done in the past - to push myself and the band creatively, vocally, and lyrically.

Whenever I've improved, gone up a level in sound-making, it's been because I've done an album.

One thing I love about Lady Gaga is I feel like her sound is always evolving and changing with her and her phases of life.

I just wanna make more music, legit music as opposed to keeping the same constant thing. I wanna show growth in the music, pretty much.

I'm always going to be experimenting musically, trying new things.

I was trying to make my name just Artist in the beginning, but it was weird at first, because I wasn't an R&B singer or nothing. Not an R&B singer. I didn't do no melodic songs, none of that yet.

The Richard Ashcroft of 1992 would have struggled to imagine the path my life has taken - he would be amazed at the changes in my song writing.

To listen to my first record, it doesn't sound like me.