Heather Headley Quotes

My father started me singing in church.

I think of childhood as an explosion of creativity. For most people, growing up and earning a living means leaving all that behind. But an artist never leaves that behind. Edwin Mullhouse was my way of exploring the child as artist and, under the guise of childhood, something larger.

My father was a rabbi and had a little synagogue in Canada, so I'm from Canada. I left there at 16.

I made my first song when I was 9 years old. Just beating on garbage cans, having people beat box.

For me, drum elements are like hieroglyphics - I think of a certain physical figure, and a little three-dimensional glyph will appear in my mind as I'm playing.

Music is powered by ideas. If you don't have clarity of ideas, you're just communicating sheer sound.

When I played Darth Maul, it sort of came from inside. I'm not saying it was natural, but I really enjoyed it, and I think I was tapping into my childhood, growing up with 'Star Wars.' And I grew up with G.I. Joe as well. Same as 'Thundercats' and 'Transformers' and 'He-Man.' And so I think it was the inner kid in me just came out.

When I was in school I read a lot of comic books and pretend I was in them and kids would tease me and call me names. But now I do the same things and people say that I'm artistic and cool and I'm doing the exact same thing I did in high school.

I used to - my earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I've always heard kind of melodies in my head.

I'm very strong creatively, in my music.

I wrote my first play when I was eight.

I'm definitely gonna do another solo record at some point. 'Flamingo' wasn't just me dipping my toes in the water. I really loved it. It was successful, and that helps, but I love those songs, and I miss singing them.

With music, you can put sophisticated thoughts in a child's head - it gives you a whole new avenue to express ideas.

I grew up in so much church: English-speaking church, Korean church.

'Roxbury Drive' was the street I grew up on as a little kid, and it was the street that I first listened to records on, and where I actually really first fell in love with music.

My childhood was all about going to church, singing in church. And later on, after I got a little older, my mother taught me how to do poems for Easter and Mother's Day, recitals and so on. I got attached to that, so as I got older and older, I began to recite poetry.

When I was little, I had this old video camera, and I set it up, and I would pretend that I was on comedy shows and soap operas and things like that.

I always tend to think that composing is not playing an instrument, composing is having something in your head that's steaming and it has to go out. It has to become sounds and be written. It's an emotion that you can't repress.

My granddad was an elder at our church, so it was a big part of my life growing up.

I was writing songs as a kid about leprechauns and Catwoman and teapots - whatever it is that little girls wanna sing about.

I began thinking about why am I constructing almost a shadow father or ghost father in my head into Graham Greene in response to the father who created me? What's going on here? I think a part of my sense is it's every boy's story. When we are kids, we imagine that to define ourselves or to find ourselves means charting your own individuality, making your own destiny and actually running away from your parents and your home and what you grew up with.

I don't want my kids growing up with the image of God that I had -- Plato's white grandfatherly god -- because that god is not a very good father. When it comes down to it, you can't trust him with your kids.

If I'm reading about a river or the trees or the wind blowing or the stars at night, if you can hear that in the music in some way, you've wedded the two and your imagination takes off. To be able to hear that in music is really important.

They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.

Until I was about 7, I thought books were just there, like trees. When I learned that people actually wrote them, I wanted to, too, because all children aspire to inhuman feats like flying. Most people grow up to realize they can't fly. Writers are people who don't grow up to realize they can't be God.