Expression Through Music Quotes

When movement isn't enough, you dance, or when speaking isn't enough, you sing. When it's organic, and it's earned like that in a musical, that's when it works, and then there's nothing like it because it's this thing that takes you to a whole 'nother level, you know?

I come from the home-grown punk ethic, where it doesn't matter if you can't play a note, it's how you communicate.

Today if something is not worth saying, people sing it.

Singing brings out in me what I can't normally bring out in everyday life. It's an incredible feeling to be able to bare your soul to people you've never met in a way that can make them understand so clearly what you mean. That's what I love most about singing ... it becomes my truest form of communication.

Music gives voices to people struggling to come out of themselves.

To me songwriting is more like redemption. I can extract the poison or the pollen, the essence from a situation and the rest becomes a husk that blows away.

Hip-hop started as this niche moment, and the values of it, the cultures that it carried on its back; language, clothes, the way you wear your clothes, the items that you consume, all came with the music as an art form. And those things helped transform how people buy, shop, speak, engage.

As far as influences, I listen to a lot of people like Nina Simone and other androgynous voices, almost to make me feel like I'm not alone.

Music was my way of keeping people from looking through and around me. I wanted the heavies to know I was around.

What I have to say is all in the music. If I want to say anything, I write a song.

Things that I would say or would like to saw are just easier to sing about and put out there in music.

What's cool about the beatboxing is I was so afraid to sing in front of my peers, my parents, anybody. I just wouldn't do it. So in sixth grade, I would turn to beatboxing because it made me feel better. Like, I can beatbox 'Drop It Like It's Hot.' Doing that a bunch of times eventually gave me the confidence to sing in front of people.

My work is my way of expressing myself without being arrested.

The roots of my music start from the ghetto.

Dancing inspires my music. Having your girlfriends all together and just being free and happy.

I'm just playing songs for my friends and for people, and they're just like, 'Wow, this is powerful.' I'm excited. It's also important that, in the record, I move the focus a little bit away from me to more about the things that I think about, communities like drag, gender expression, and friendship-concepts that go beyond me.

The whole point of creating music for me is to give voice to things that aren't normally given voice to.

'Cabaret' was one of the first pieces of musical theater I saw that showed the possibilities of what musical theater can do.

I'd always been quite quiet growing up, and singing was a way of having a voice.

Words sing. They hurt. They teach. They sanctify. They were man's first, immeasurable feat of magic. They liberated us from ignorance and our barbarous past.

One of the reasons I took up the guitar was I didn't want to speak to anybody. I really felt uncomfortable speaking to people, so I took the guitar up so I could hide behind it. I'm not comfortable explaining things, because my brain doesn't work that way.

Music has been my outlet, my gift to all of the lovers in this world. Through it - my music, I know I will live forever.

As a woman especially I've found a lot of freedom in music.

It wasn't until I found my tribe of artists - people who were outspoken and not afraid to say what they thought, whether in a song or a dance or a piece of classical music - that I found a refuge.