BJ the Chicago Kid Quotes

I think that soul, to me, is the theme of music that I connect with.

One of the most important things to me as a songwriter is to make music that's young and fresh but also soulful and real. I want people to feel like they know me once they listen to my songs.

It excites me when a person puts their whole self in a song or rhyme, or instrument. It fills me.

I want to reach the people. This music is the people's music. It's music for your brain, for your heart, for your soul. That is what we always go to achieve. Soul united.

You have to open your mind. I like the ability to express myself in a deep way. It's the closest music to our humanity - it's like a folk music that rises up out of a culture.

There's all sorts of soul. There's Irish soul and Native American soul. If it touches you and moves you, it's soul.

The blues is nothing but a story... The verses which are sung in the blues is a true story, what people are doing... what they all went through. It's not just a song, see?

I listen to a lot of songs, and they aren't talking about anything. I don't connect with them. I'll listen to something like Musiq Soulchild's 'Just Friends,' and I'm like, 'Wow, I really feel what he's talking about.' That's how I want people to feel about my music.

Music is the embodiment of my soul. When I play, I'm not performing a song: I'm becoming it.

Really, what I'm trying to do is make soul music, but I don't even think of it as a genre. It's more of a feeling.

This is one of the major purposes of soul and jazz music; to state what you feel.

It's not enough to play a song: you have to inhabit it.

I think blues music is music of the soul. Of course, there are other forms. You could call some classical music blues music in that way.

Jesus, music has always been my first love. I use music in my work because it's the fastest way to an emotional place. You hear a song, and that memory comes right back-- you're there... Making music is immediate, and it's all about you. If you're playing guitar, the feeling comes through-- the way you bend the note, the intensity with which you hit the strings. With making films, although it's real emotion, it's false emotion. You're lying.

Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.

Whenever I start to really think about what I'm playing, I may play it better musically, but the feeling isn't there.

Music should be able to invoke the natural emotions in all human beings. Music is not notes fixed on apiece of paper.

The blues is life itself.

When I listen to a song, I don't say, 'Oh my gosh, that vocal line she sang was the best thing I ever heard.' I'm thinking, 'That lyric just moves me. That lyric just said what I feel better than I could say it myself.'

I love Lauryn Hill, Tracy Chapman, Fiona Apple. People like that. People you can really connect to on the most basic human level.

Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life.

Is it not the business of the conductor to convey to the public in its dramatic form the central idea of a composition; and how can he convey that idea successfully if he does not enter heart and soul into the life of the music and the tale it unfolds?

Every song I've ever written always starts with the words because I want the music to be the musical extension of the feelings of the words, and not the words being the emotional extension of the feeling of the music.

Music is essentially an emotional language, so you want to feel something from the relationships and build music based on those feelings.

Piano playing is a dying art. I love the fact that I can be one guy with one instrument evoking an emotional and musical experience.