Vocal Authenticity Quotes

I'm a fan of real singers. I just gravitate towards that.

The best way to use the auto-tune is not to! And that's what I do: I do not use auto-tune!

My voice is who I am, who I was when I was 3, and who I am going to be when I am 90 years old. When I hit the stage and people do not know who I am, they automatically assume, before I open my mouth, I am going to sing a Bob Marley song!

This is where the guys who copy me are planted: I do not use auto-tune, I sing. That's my advice!

I could hear your heart and soul come through your voice!

But when you are doing an animated voice, it has to have more energy than usual or it falls flat and doesn't work. For myself, I found that I had to put myself in the same physical or emotional state as Sid, in order to make that voice sound alive and authentic. So if there was a scene in which he was running, I would be running beforehand to sound out of breath. That's important because the audience can tell intuitively if it does not sound real.

I once asked a studio guy in Toronto, "How many people don't use auto tune?" and he said, "You and Nelly Furtado are the only two people who've never used it in here." Even though I'm not into Nelly Furtado, it kind of made me respect her. It's cool that she has some integrity.

I've done a lot of shows over a long time, and I've lost my voice on plays before, and it's because I've been thinking closely about what I'm doing with my voice. Babies can scream all day and never lose their voice because they just mean it. As long as you mean it, then it carries you through. It's do it or don't.

I try to stick with things that I can sing with honesty.

I like 'Goodbye My Lover' because it's a really personal song and I recorded it in my landlady's bathroom in Los Angeles. She had a piano in there and for me listening back to it, it actually sounds like the voice I hear in my head. It's so close to what I can imagine.

When I sing, I try to communicate certain emotions, and that's the voice that comes out.

I don't think I'm turning back the clock by doing these old tunes. I love rock and roll and popular music. It's just that the spirits of the singers whose songs I do are living within me. That's why the songs come out in the voices of the original singers. I'm not doing imitations. That's the way they sound inside me.

Because of things like 'The X Factor' and 'Autotune', the real art of communicating a song is not treasured any more. But singing other people's songs can be an intensely personal experience. I want the songs to be vessels that people fill with their own imagination, the same way that I fill it with my thoughts and feelings.

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.

In my early days I was a sepia Hedy Lamarr. Now I'm black and a woman, singing my own way.

Oh, I just sing like I hurt inside.

I used to be really nervous when I sang. Like, when I was a kid starting young, 18 and 19, and my dad really had to sort of push me to start singing in front of people. Ever since I got out there and really started doing it, the only thing I've ever tried to do is just sort of is be myself, you know, never put on a voice. Sing naturally.

I pride myself on having a really authentic music sound: no gimmicks, just my vocals.

Colossus' voice is not much different than mine, as Tim loved my natural color and range of voice, so we kept it and worked more on the Russian accent. The best note I received was to be authentic.

If you can sing, you never lose your voice. If you don't know how to sing, your voice goes away because you sing from your throat.

I never got lessons. I took influence from Chet Baker, Ian Dury, and Joe Strummer. I don't hear my voice and think, 'Yeah, that's a banging voice!' It's more about putting the right emotions into the right words and the lyrics than anything else to me.

It would actually feel forced or unnatural to try to do a different singing style or to try to change my sound completely.

With James Brown, I just learn the lyrics and then get out there and get funky with it and let my spirit free. But doing Charles Bradley, it's a lot of true, intimate words coming out of me that show me the picture inside myself.

It is never about how good your voice is; it is only about feeling the urge to sing, and then having the courage to do it with the voice you are given.

It is kind of easy for me to speak out. Just because I am very vocal in my music about a lot of different emotions, like anger, and normally stuff that people would hide, I'm okay with as a woman.