Bobby McFerrin Quotes

To sing a song is like whispering to a child's ear. It is an art heavily relying on improvisation.

We don't have a particular plan. We just do what we do. This is the only way we know how to do it. We make the music that moves us. We use it as therapy. The songs are cathartic. They're ways of dealing with life experiences and the world around you. It's meant to be as a release for us as it is for other people.

All which isn't singing is mere talking... and all talking's to oneself alone but the very song of (as mountains feel and lovers) singing is silence.

I like Stan [Getz], because he has so much patience, the way he plays those melodies - other people can't get nothing out of a song, but he can, which takes a lot of imagination.

I'm not supposed to be playing, the music is supposed to be playing me. I'm just supposed to be standing there with the horn, moving my fingers. The music is supposed to be coming through me; that's when it's really happening.

Keyboardists whose chief asset is mere technique . . . more often than not astound us with their prowess without ever touching our sensibilities. They overwhelm our hearing without satisfying it and stun the mind without moving it.

I liked his voice, rich and unself-conscious even when he forgot words and hummed to fill in the gap. What I didn't understand, I imagined, and thus it became a love song.

I'd trusted my fan base, I'd trusted the my gut, and I'd trusted the music. ...the real experts are out there in front of you every night. They're the ones buying the tickets and coming to the shows. They're the professionals in this business, and they're the only ones who can tell you which songs have the ability to move them.

We're going to sing about things that matter to us. The balancing act is to present these ideas but also make the music exciting and sort of fun enough that even if you're not paying attention to the lyrics, you might still like the songs anyway. That's the idea.

I think the other thing that's important is getting to a place, which very, very rarely happens with improvising groups, where somebody can decide not to play for a while. You watch any group of musicians improvising together and they nearly all play nearly all the time. In fact I often say that the biggest difference between classical music and everything else is that classical musicians sometimes shut up because they're told to, because the score tells them to. Whereas any music that's sort of based on folk or jazz, everybody plays all the time.

I had this talent for these stupid little teenage songs. I just couldn't get anyone to sing my songs, so I had to sing my own tunes.

Jazz is something you have to feel, something you have to live.

I think music moves me more than other people. I can hear a song and it can bring me to tears. It doesn't happen the whole time, but I find songwriting - songs - very, very moving. I always have and I don't think it's fading.

At every concert I leave a lot to the moment. I must have the unexpected, the unforeseen. I want to risk, to dare. I want to be surprised by what comes out. I want to enjoy it more than the audience. That way the music can bloom anew. It's like making love. The act is always the same, but each time it's different.

I have to admit that more and more lately, the whole idea of jazz as an idiom is one that I've completely rejected. I just don't see it as an idiomatic thing any more...To me, if jazz is anything, it's a process, and maybe a verb, but it's not a thing. It's a form that demands that you bring to it things athat are valuable to you, that are personal to you. That, for me, is a pretty serious distinction that doesn't have anything to do with blues, or swing, or any of these other things that tend to be listed as essentials in order for music to be jazz with a capital J.

A conductor has to know how to translate music into a communicative force that makes the listener want to hear what he has to say.

I should attempt to write a love song, I have written lots of poetry about love so I could turn those into lyrics. I'm a sucker for romance - always have been, always will be. I love walking down the beach and listening to my iPod and belting them out. What would we do without love songs?

When you love a song so much you have to sing, you know how you feel - it releases something in you that resonates as true, whether it's James Brown or Joni Mitchell.

What is it that makes you want to write songs? In a way you want to stretch yourself into other people’s hearts. You want to plant yourself there, or at least get a resonance, where other people become a bigger instrument than the one you’re playing. It becomes almost an obsession to touch other people. To write a song that is remembered and taken to heart is a connection, a touching of bases. A thread that runs through all of us. A stab to the heart. Sometimes I think songwriting is about tightening the heartstrings as much as possible without bringing on a heart attack.

You do not know the first note of the music that moves me.

I said to [Lionel] Richie, "Man, my wife says you must really respect women because you write such beautiful love songs."

The thing that I love about acting is the fact that I can help people feel things, know themselves or feel less alone. It's my form of expression, in the same way that someone might paint a picture or sing a song in that you're hoping that it moves somebody outside of their own way of thinking.

Many people forget that Jazz, no matter what form it takes, must come from the heart as well as the mind.

It's cool that you hear something, but what did you feel and what was your tactile and kinesthetic response to it? Those songs and creative sessions mean the most.

In truth we know by experience that song has great force and vigour to move and inflame the hearts of men to invoke and praise God with a more vehement and ardent zeal.