I do seem to like to combine the dramatic emotional warmth of strings with the grooves and body business of drums and bass.

I do put a lot of God in my music, but not because I’m super religious. There are a lot of demons in my music, too. I acknowledge both.

I’m working on my life story. I’m not decided if it’s going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.

When it comes down to it, glam rock was all very amusing. At the time, it was funny, then a few years later it became sort of serious-looking and a bit foreboding.

Phish and Dave Matthews really know their audiences and really treat them well.

I always loved that old song ‚Banks of the Ohio‘ – it was always such a man’s song, so I’ve always wanted to record it.

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

Music is always a commentary on society.

I didn’t live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don’t know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.

Doo-wop is special music to me because it’s so straightforward and melody-driven and captures emotions.

I always had music growing up, but music was also like a journal. It was like my personal diary or personal journal. A lot of the things I couldn’t express to an individual, I would express them in my music.

I try to sprinkle a little gems and jewels in the music that people could use in their own life.

When I was born, that was the music my mother was listening to. Michael Jackson is a third parent to me.

How I love David Bowie.

I liberate minds with my music. That’s more important than liberating a few people from apartheid or whatever.

You know, my sister sings, my brother plays drums in my band. My whole family is a bunch of musicians.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place.

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

If you pour your life into songs, you want them to be heard. It’s a desire to communicate. A deep desire to communicate inspires songwriting.

I never could get over the fact that The Pixies formed, worked and separated without America taking them to its heart or even recognizing their existence for the most part.

Mine is only one of the millions of hearts broken over the death of Whitney Houston, I will always be grateful and in awe of the wonderful performance she did on my song, and I can truly say from the bottom of my heart, ‚Whitney, I will always love you. You will be missed.‘

Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

I’ve been a huge fan of Chris Martin forever; it’d be awesome to work with him. He’s really kind, and he’s been really encouraging when we’ve met.

One day, I’ll be listening to a bunch of Ray Charles, the next day it’s nothing but Red Hot Chili Peppers. The next day it might be Tupac all day.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

There’s more good music being made now than ever before.

My guitar only has five strings ‚cause the top one broke and I decided not to put it back on: when I play chords I only play bar chords, and the top one always used to cut me there.

There weren’t a lot of career opportunities in crazy-fast hardcore punk, so you didn’t have a lot of ambition, just the love and passion to play music with your friends.

We uploaded ‚Ocean Eyes‘ to SoundCloud, and it started getting a lot of plays pretty much immediately.

I just wanted to be a composer; I became an actor by default, really. I got a scholarship to a college of music and drama, hoping to take a scholarship in music. But I ended up as an acting student, so I’ve stuck with that for the last 50-odd years.

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 don’t live for the accolades. I’m more so about the music. Making it, and putting it out. Those are the two best feelings.

Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.

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.

In Hawaii, some of the biggest radio stations are reggae. The local bands are heavily influenced by Bob Marley.

‚House of Balloons‘ was special because I had no deadlines, and nobody knew me, so there were no expectations. Spent a year making it perfect. Every song had at least, like, 7 different versions to them before picking the right one.

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.

I really like hip-hop and rap; that’s my main influence. I really wanna be more of a hip-hop artist.

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.

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

I could sing you a thousand and one doo-wop songs. I love the simplicity in that music. It’s not super-poetic, it’s just from the heart.

Sometimes I do need to go to karaoke, sometimes I need to relax.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman.

I’m super serious about music. That’s, like, the only thing I’m serious about.

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

I never wanted to look pretty on stage and sing about something we’ve all heard about before.

Whatever I’m feeling, whatever I’m going through, whatever mood I’m in… If I’m feeling like dancing or clubbing, then it will be reflected in the music. If I’m feeling dark and vulnerable, then it will reflect in the music, too.

I make good music for long journeys.

I believe in singing to such an extent that, if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing becomes a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for cooperation with others.

In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.

I was a strange, loud little kid who could sit at the piano and kill a Beethoven piece.

Music has to be sort of ignorable sometimes.

I used to – my earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I’ve always heard kind of melodies in my head.

I tried to give the world a bit of creativity, lyrics. And for me, I will always represent music from Puerto Rico, reggaeton, Latin music.

Searching for music is like searching for God. They’re very similar. There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

I want to thank The Beatles for almost single-handedly getting me out of writer’s block.

I try to really capitalize off of what other rappers really can’t do. There are opportunities that rappers I love simply can’t get, because… you know… I don’t have the tattoos; I have a different image.

Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.

If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that… I believe in what I do, and I’ll say it.

There’s a reason why the Foo Fighters don’t blast out Nirvana songs every night: because we have a lot of respect for them. You know, that’s hallowed ground. We have to be careful. We have to tread lightly. We have talked about it before, but the opportunity hasn’t really come up, or it just hasn’t felt right.