Individuality in Music Quotes

When I first started, I wrote some songs with Linda Perry. She's so instrumental in a lot of artist's lives, listening to you and then helping you write songs that are you, that bring the most of what you are out, whereas a lot of producers might put their stamp on you. I gained confidence because I'm less of a straight-up, traditional vocalist.

It's always funny to me when people use the phrase 'Best guitar player in the world'. There are too many variables such as technique, uniqueness, emotional investment in the notes, etc. But If I had to pick one, it would be Tommy Emmanuel. Watching him perform can be a study in artistic and virtuosic human achievement.

I think it's important to say something. If you're making music it's kinda' like, oh, cool, so is everyone else.

I think that if people show up in jeans and chains, it's great that all parts of culture are interested in music. People forget sometimes that it's about the music, not how you act and dress.

Any saxophone player will have those influences come through in their music in a very different way. I can listen to the same 10 sax players as someone else for my entire life, and we'll both play completely differently. That's the beauty of being a musician.

Of all the songs that I've written since I was 15 or 16, every song is different every song is special, it happens in a different way and I like that.

and half of learning to play is learning what not to play and she's learning the spaces she leaves have their own things to say and she's trying to sing just enough so that the air around her moves and make music like mercy that gives what it is and has nothing to prove she crawls out on a limb and begins to build her home and it's enough just to look around and to know that she's not alone up up up up up up up points the spire of the steeple but god's work isn't done by god it's done by people

[My music] is opposite to fashion.

I'm one dude that writes his adlibs. I don't just go in there and say "Gimme a track." I say what I'ma say here [then] I put effects on my voice. Why not? I wrote it. Why not show the talent? Why be scared? That's why I hate certain fans who hate cause it's not like raw hip-hop, like boom bap.

I believe that the only excuse we have for being musicians and for making music in any fashion, is to make it differently, to perform it differently, to establish the music's difference, vis-a-vis our own difference.

Every band sells t-shirts and plays certain auditoriums, but I'm sick of being like everyone else, because I'm not.

I'm the audience first, and if you're gonna be a great performer, you need to be a great audience. So, I do music for me first, and whoever likes it likes it, and whoever doesn't -- well, it's just not for them.

The cliché of that sort of wasted, renegade, drugged-out musician of the '70s is kind of dead and gone now. And I suppose that a lot of people still keep relying on that, or some kind of image to perpetuate something that they think they're supposed to sound like. But that kind of takes you away from real inspiration and, you know, real artistic discovery of the individual.

I have my own style, but it's different for each kind of music. There are certain little characteristic things every player has.

I just think music is one of those frontiers where people really want the "I" to be you.

In the music industry, it's pretty easy to make an album just because you want to keep going, like, 'This is the formula.' But the formula is your life. You have to live your life and you have to live it well - that's the formula.

For me, being transparent about every aspect of my life is what makes my music relatable and how I'm able to be an individual amongst the mass amounts of other artists.

[Thelonious] Monk is a subject in itself. I mean, most piano players in most big bands sit down and they play with the band, you know. But Monk would just sit there like this. And all of a sudden there'd be a pause from all the trumpets and everything and Monk would go 'plink!' like that. And everybody would go 'Yeah!

I already feel that I am making a political statement by sticking around in music, when I am doing it so differently to everyone else.

I respect so many people, but I guess I'd have to say Madonna. Not being cliché or anything because she and I don't share a similar sound, but I truly respect how she's been in the game so long and developed so much over time and really did it her way. It's admirable. I want something like that.

Anything you are shows up in your music - jazz is whatever you are, playing yourself, being yourself, letting your thoughts come through.

As I've grown as an artist, I've learned that my mission statement is really self-expression. I don't want anybody to classify my music. I want them to say, "This is somebody who's recognizing his true feelings, his true emotions, ideas, thoughts, opinions, and views on the world, all on one record." I want people to recognize that and to take it and apply it to their own lives. You know what I'm saying? The more and more I get out and talk to different people, I realize they appreciate that - me being unapologetic in whatever views and approach I have.

I think the people are just looking for freedom in music...There's a lot of she-bop she-bop going on out there. Maybe they're tired of that same old thing.

You can time a part perfectly and play it badly. And some people have very individual offbeat timing, which is their own. It works simply because they are who they are.

I felt that I really couldn't be creative with opera. You're supposed to sound this way here. You're supposed to crescendo here. You're supposed to do that. I had no sense of identity while singing that kind of music.