Cause when you’re sequencing a record, you want the listener to stick with it from beginning to end, and in order to do that, you really have to map out the journey from the first song to the last.

We based the look on rock ‚n roll right from the beginning.

My favorite artists always documented emotion. Marvin Gaye and Al Green and Sade and Aaliyah.

Five or six songs leaked from the original version of ‚Encore.‘ So I had to go in and make new songs to replace them.

From the beginning of my rap career, since I was seen and heard, I always had a store.

I put out tapes, but I always kept saying, ‚Why am I putting all this energy into these tapes?‘ I was like, ‚I’d rather make just an album because I have a vision; I know how I want to do my records.‘ I always felt like an artist as well.

I don’t like the name, U2, actually.

The only frustrating thing about jail is that I can’t make music.

I love to play music. So why endanger that with something like drugs?

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around – the music and the ideas.

I have never used Auto-Tune in a live television performance, and I have never used Auto-Tune in any of my concerts. That is a promise.

Whenever I make music, it reflects where I’m at mentally.

‚Victory‘ is like, you won, so the question is, what? What did you win? I think that the songs go into that. It’s just about reaching a place in myself.

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.

My music is a luxury.

‚Evil men have no songs.‘ How is it that the Russians have songs?

It’s about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness – sonic goodies.

I can write a song in about an hour if it’s a simple country song.

If this were all to go away tomorrow, all the big success, I would still be very happy going from bar to bar playing music for people.

I’m a huge fan of R. Kelly’s. He’s a musical genius and probably the most prolific artist of the generation before mine.

I wish I could tell you me and my rock band were traveling around, strung out. No, we were a family band. Straight Partridge Family.

I always say, you gotta play a dive bar like you play an arena, and you play an arena like you play a dive bar.

I live half the year on Necker, a tiny island in the Caribbean, and it’s always full of people in party mode. Everyone comes up to the big house, and we’ll be dancing until the early hours to the island’s band, the Front Line.

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

Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story.

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

If you hear Anarchy in the UK today your hair stands on end. It gives you the shivers.

In my songs, I’m not saying something that’s never been said before. The have lyrics aren’t going to blow people away. It’s the emotion and the melody that drive it home.

I can dance to just about anything.

I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.

The instrument that I never learned how to play was my fans. You know, they are the part of the story that nobody teaches you. I just want to do the right thing; I want to be a voice with them, among them.

From the time that ‚Nevermind‘ came out in September of 1991 to the time that Nirvana was over, it was really just a few years, and a lot happened in those few years.

Now, we are selling over 5 million songs a day now. Isn’t that unbelievable? That’s 58 songs every second of every minute of every hour of every day.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

I have a very eclectic iPod. So I’ve got my cardio people – so it’s anything from Beyonce to some Jay-Z to Janelle Monae, her song ‚Tightrope,‘ that’s a good cardio song. And then I’ve got Sting. I’ve got Mary J. Blige. I’ve got The Beatles. I’ve got Michael Jackson. I try to pick the songs that I personally love.

Getting a great idea with song writing is a lot like love. You don’t know why this one is different, but it is. You don’t know why this one is better, but it is. It sticks in your head, and you can’t stop thinking about it.

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

Music has the power to inspire the world.

I went through all the musicians in my life who I admire as bright, intelligent, virtuosic players.

Music is in my DNA!

My body is damaged from music in two ways. I have a red irritation in my stomach. It’s psychosomatic, caused by all the anger and the screaming. I have scoliosis, where the curvature of your spine is bent, and the weight of my guitar has made it worse. I’m always in pain, and that adds to the anger in our music.

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 think Mozart’s operas ‚The Marriage of Figaro‘ and ‚Don Giovanni‘ are the two most perfect ever written. The music is magical.

I do value the respect I get from my contemporaries, but to have Oasis cover my song, to have Puff Daddy cover a song, to have Goldie come along to my gigs – that’s where my ego is at. To have my fellow musicians like what I do, that’s very cool.

If it’s good music, it’s good music.

I say, ‚Yeah, Taylor Swift.‘ I think she is a smart, beautiful girl. I think she’s making all the right moves. She’s got a good head on her shoulders. She’s surrounded with wonderful people. Her songs are great. She keeps herself anchored. She knows who she is, and she’s living and standing by that.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

When ‚Paul’s Boutique‘ came out, I was one of the fans that didn’t get it.

I feel like in my music I can be a rebel. I can say things I wouldn’t say in real life.

I’ve noticed a lot of younger artists have less fear of doing different sorts of things, whether it’s various types of music, or gallery artists moving between video and sculpture and drawing.

I need drama in my life to keep making music.

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.

Rock ‚n‘ roll is ridiculous. It’s absurd. In the past, U2 was trying to duck that. Now we’re wrapping our arms around it and giving it a great big kiss.

It is impossible to experience one’s death objectively and still carry a tune.

You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.

I collect records. And cats. I don’t have any cats right now. But if I’m taking a walk and I see a cat, I’m happy.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

Punk is musical freedom. It’s saying, doing and playing what you want. In Webster’s terms, ‚nirvana‘ means freedom from pain, suffering and the external world, and that’s pretty close to my definition of Punk Rock.

One of my most popular songs, ‚Satellites,‘ I paid $300 for that beat on SoundClick.

I’ve gotten used to being Frank Ocean.

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.