There’s something missing in the music industry today… and it’s music. Songs you hear don’t last, it’s just product fed to you by the industry.

I was doing sold-out shows before I got radio play.

I have to practice to be good at guitar. I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

There is a heavy emphasis in Mormonism on initiative, on responsibility, on a work ethic, and on education. If you take those elements together with a free-enterprise system, you’ve got the chemistry for a lot of industry.

I want to be a recording artist for my whole entire life. But Broadway is something I would come back to at any given moment. I love, love, love doing theater.

Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.

In Puerto Rico we dance to everything.

In high school I wanted to be a rock star and was in a lot of bands.

I’ve got my Grammys on top of my piano and I look at them when I play.

Here’s what I think about music and journalism: The most important thing is to just press play.

To go indie is a thing. But to put an album in the stores, you need a distribution label.

I grew up on the Beatles; I love Linkin Park and Green Day. I heard hip-hop for the first time at 11 and realized what I was missing.

The age of a woman doesn’t mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.

I think the first thing you should know is that nobody in country music ‚made it‘ the same way. It’s all different. There’s no blueprint for success, and sometimes you just have to work at it.

This thing that I do with caring about the message in my music, it’s not separate from my work as a commercial artist; they’re totally one and the same. I’m always going to be thinking about what my voice means.

I think we’re about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.

I like being able to be on the inside of music, rather than on the outside listening to it.

Dropkick Murphys get me going, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana… plus, all the regular hip-hop stuff.

My dad was into the 1950s doo-wop era. If you look at those groups, or at James Brown, Jackie Wilson and the Temptations in the 1960s, you’ll see you had to be sharp onstage.

My audience went, ‚Wait, why is she singing jazz? What’s going on?‘ And then they went, ‚Oh, because she can. Because she loves it.‘ And jazz, a music invented by the African-American community, is the greatest art form, I believe, to have ever come out of this country.

What changed our lives forever was when Malcolm had the idea to sell rock ‚n roll records to trendy customers.

I pay attention to lyrics and I know what rap fans care about. I try to write for the average listener and I’m conscious of the mainstream without selling out.

Lots of songs aren’t even from my experiences, but they’re about accepting… the dark things about yourself.

Music for me, it demands full concentration.

Most people wouldn’t know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

I met India Arie, who is one of my favorite artists of all time. It was really sweet; I was broken up with a month before, and she stayed up texting me all night and was helping me through it. Her text message looks like a song of hers. She’s sort of become my fairy godmother.

U2 is an original species… there are colours and feelings and emotional terrain that we occupy that is ours and ours alone.

Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world.

There’s poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don’t like doing what people expect me to do.

I wish I could play bass like Larry Graham or Bootsy Collins. My God, I’d give up just about everything else for that.

The music industry is a strange combination of having real and intangible assets: pop bands are brand names in themselves, and at a given stage in their careers their name alone can practically gaurantee hit records.

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

No rapper in the world from Jay-Z to Tupac to Biggie has 100 percent love on everything they do.

All my records and videos were groundbreaking.

In hip-hop, there’s not a lot of love. There’s not a lot of love being spread. It’s always like ‚I’m stuntin‘ on you raps, or I’m better than you raps.‘ It’s not a lot of ‚Yo man, I idolize you raps.‘

There’s been people who’ve rapped and produced – like Kanye – but I don’t feel like on the rapping side there’s ever been a producer who can rap as good as I think I can rap.

If you talk bad about country music, it’s like saying bad things about my momma. Them’s fightin‘ words.

I put out one album one week, and I’m already worried about the next one. I feel a lot of emotion throughout the course of a day. But not to the point where you need to be worried about me.

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we’d all love one another.

I’ve got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.

Ever since the beginning of rock and roll, there’s been an Axl Rose. And it’s just boring. It’s totally boring to me.

I used to think that, given enough goodwill, anybody would be able to ‚get‘ any music, no matter how distant the culture from which it came. And then I heard Chinese opera.

You don’t hear no artists from Compton showing vulnerability.

I always use Michael as, first and foremost, a vocal inspiration, and ‚Off the Wall‘ was definitely the one that made me feel like I could sing.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

When I do listen to music, I’m more prone to listen to the people I’ve always listened to: George Jones, Otis Redding, Alison Krauss and Emmylou Harris.

The barriers are not erected which can say to aspiring talents and industry, ‚Thus far and no farther.‘

So there’s no guarantee if you like the music you will empathize with the culture and the people who made it. It doesn’t necessarily happen. I think it can, but it doesn’t necessarily happen. Which is kind of a shame.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

People think because I’ve got some success, I’ve made it, but in my eyes it’s like, ‚How long has Jay Z been in the business? How many albums has he got?‘ Not that I’m trying to be Jay Z, but I am trying to be around for a long time.

You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.

What I like about music is the songs you can remember the lines of in a single second.

I would say that jazz is my own language.

A lot of people from my generation of music are so focused on playing things correctly or to perfection that they’re stuck in that safe place.

I don’t think a song should be put in a category.

I’d love to do a duet, always wanted to work with Madonna, but she never asked.

At 57, to have a No. 1 album, I wasn’t expecting it.

I just wanted to be a songwriter. I did really not like the sound of my own voice.

I was always singing but didn’t plan on pursuing it seriously. When I got to New York City when I was 18, I started playing in clubs in Brooklyn – I have good friends and devoted fans on the underground scene, but we were playing for each other at that point – and that was it.

I can’t deny that label-support gave me a leg up – though not every successful artist needs it.