Regional Influences Quotes

My family is from Liverpool, so I have some of those vowel sounds, I've got the slack tone of someone from Birmingham, and then I was raised in Bedford, which is just north of London. So my accent, if it's possible, makes even less sense to a Brit than to an American.

I was born in the Northeast, and I have Midwestern parents.

I never tried to emulate that New York rap style. What I do is a quasi rap. It's a honky rap, not a black rap. I find it puzzling that so many people have assumed I'm black.

I didn't grow up in one place, so I never had a certain mentality. I have some aspects of growing up in Texas, but I also have a lot of East Coast family. I would have loved to grow up on the East Coast.

When this genre of music started in America, Metallica was up north in California, we were in Southern California, Anthrax was on the East Coast. We each developed our own metal music, and after 30 years, we're still playing our metal music.

Wherever you're from, you adapt to your environment. It definitely made my music a little bit more explicit. Because I really was in North Philly, I listened to State Property and stuff. Everything my dad listened to, I listened to.

In Zagreb, the Old Town really could be Prague. You go two hours to the coast to Opatija, and you really could be in the South of France, in the Croatian Riviera. And then you head down the coast towards Split, and you get into more Turkish architecture, so you can double Istanbul.

I guess everything having to do with your background has some influence on how you tell stories but it's hard to parse how growing up in a Jewish community in Minnesota really affected it.

He's from Fayetteville. I'm from Charlotte. We got two different upbringings. All in all though, I love J. Cole's perspective and I love his music. I love his approach. It's just two different things.

We need to keep an eye on influences from the Middle East or, let's say, indigenous groups, that might be involved in terrorism.

In Canada we have enough to do keeping up with two spoken languages ... so we just go right ahead and use English for literature, Scotch for sermons, and American for conversation.

My style is a very universal sound, which is very close to where I grew up.

Coming out of the Northwest and that environment to shoot hip-hop videos, it's a little atypical of a place to be, you know.

I'm sort of a Southerner because those are my roots, but my parents are from Iowa.

Grunge came from a group of English photographers, and they were documenting their own reality... I'm South American - we celebrate life.

I have a West Coast rhythm section and a New York rhythm section. I've got them spread out all over the place.

In Tijuana, because there's such a mix and match of people and regions and we're a newer city and everyone comes from some place else, I think we're just given permission to play with our food.

Location is a very important aspect to songwriting.

You know Bakersfield was full of workers from the south, from Texas and Arkansas, and they brought their gospel and blues with them. And that's the sound I grew with.

For me, personally, Detroit is a melting pot for everything. We get the best from the East Coast, West Coast and down South.

You know, I'm from the Midwest, man - that shapes my personality much more than having gone to Harvard.

We have our roots in country, and that's our foundation, but we pull from a lot.

What is American music? The most satisfying answer I've come across is that it was a kind of natural comfort with the vernacular which is diverse and regional; it's not one particular set of sounds.

I was born in Missouri, but I was raised in Detroit. One of my stock and trades is accents.

When you're from the East Coast or you're from the South, people expect you to sound a certain way. So if you don't sound that way, people won't label you as that type of artist. For me, I had a whole new lane to create for myself being from Pittsburgh and being a Midwest artist.