Vonda Shepard Quotes

Songwriting is the other weight on the opposite side of the scale from touring. They balance me out creatively.

When most artists walk offstage, they go to a lonely hotel room. I went home to my family. They were there before the show, during and after. It's been great. I never would have done it any other way. I wasn't gonna miss raising my kids. There was no way that was gonna happen.

Music is my soul, and I love singing and dancing, but being on the road is not a real way of life for me anymore.

Being on the road is a great habitat for creating new music because there's so many different experiences.

If you can make the family life and the music work together that's wonderful. If you can make it work.

People ask what I really did in the three years between 'The Dreaming' and 'Hounds of Love.' I spent it with my family, living a normal home life.

I just kept making records, touring in Europe a lot, and then I had a baby in 2006, so my life has been very, very much family-orientated.

My success set me up for life, and it meant that I could retire from the music industry at 27 to spend time with my newborn daughter and my wife. My time away from the spotlight allowed me to rediscover my love for music, and I'm doing it for me now and no one else.

No matter how long what I'm doing here lasts, I want to be a songwriter for the rest of my life. I love it and it's my escape.

My grand plan is that I can master having a better life by making sure I have a regular flow of songs. Then I can give myself time to tour or celebrate or write a film score.

I love entertaining people, I love playing music, and I love rocking like an animal. But at a certain point, you're playing gig after gig after gig, in town after town after town, and you're lying down, staring at another hotel-room ceiling, and it's like, 'I want to be home. I'm a dad. I've got kids.'

Usually I go to the studio to write lyrics and compose music. I try to be a dad as much as possible at home.

It's really easy to be grounded again when you get back home, and you sing in front of 20,000 people a night, and your wife hands you the kids and tells you it's your turn to be on diaper duty and take out the trash. So it's easy to keep things in perspective when things like that happen.

I love being on the road and I love my band, but also need to be with my kids more and I need to be creating more.

In the beginning, I was a stay-at-home dad. So I could actually focus on being a rapper. I could write. I could come up with ideas.

All I've been trying to do all my life is to make great music.

What I always wanted to do was to be a rock star.

Home life's great, man. The kids are great, happy and healthy. I've reached this sort of wonderful precipice.

There's no way to be able to tell what it's like to be a country singer until you're walking in the shoes.

My family life is a deep source of satisfaction.

Being an actor is a much more structured life than being a musician.

What's great about stand-up is that you can say whatever you want and go around the country, and sometimes the world, and work on it and see how people react. You don't need Standards & Practices or notes from lawyers or producers to tell you what's funny.

Everyone wants to get into soundtracks. Everyone wants to do songs here and there. But, I think they want it for different reasons. I think I'm just tumbling through my life, enjoying playing with everybody.

I'm one of those people who thinks you can have a happy life and still be an artist.

For me, family is life. The decision to start one wasn't complex at all. My career has been wonderful, but it's not my life. I don't feel pressure to get back to work.