I think it’s really cool when artists have song titles or album names that are a really conversational sentence.

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’m a painter in sound.

Artists have a responsibility to speak and to act when governments fail, and if we don’t do that, we really deserve the world we get.

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.

Because you have things like ‚American Idol‘ and you’ve got radio stations that play music made entirely by computers, it’s easy to forget there are bands with actual people playing actual instruments that rock.

I think if I did something in the pop world right now, it would be for Rihanna. I’d love to do something production wise for her.

It’s almost schizophrenic who I portray in my music.

In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.

When I listen to ‚Nevermind,‘ I hate the production, but there’s something about it that almost makes me cry at times.

The first rap CD that I had, it was so different for me. The energy, the wordplay, all that caught my attention, and I liked it.

You can’t imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life.

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

I don’t know if I ever feel totally great about a record when I put it out. With every record that I put out, someone has literally got to come pry it from me because when I listen to my own music, I just hear flaws in it.

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.

Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn’t get some of that stuff out.

I’m no hillbilly singer.

When you listen to Ray Charles, there’s never any doubt whose voice that is.

I don’t have time to stand around and listen to an 11-minute song.

The jazz I love is sweet and pure with raw elements, which is exactly what the good hip-hop is doing now.

All I really had was a suitcase and my drums. So I took them up to Seattle and hoped it would work.

Music can change the world because it can change people.

Some artists just ruin their voices because they don’t know any better.

I wanted to prove the sustaining power of music.

I’m pretty sure in my older years, I’ll be doing old-time flavored folk-mountain music.

Hip-hop is ever changing but you’ll always have the pack. And you’ll always have those people who are separated from the pack.

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.

I wouldn’t call myself a synaesthete in the sense that Nabokov was. But I’ll talk about a sound as being cold blue or dark brown. For descriptive purposes, yes, I often see colors when I’m listening to music and think, ‚Oh, there’s not enough sort of yellowy stuff in here, or not enough white.‘

When I did ‚Bird,‘ it was a surprise to some people, first because I wasn’t in it and second because most of the films I’d been doing were cop movies or westerns or adventure films, so to be doing one about Charlie Parker, who was a great influence on American music, was a great thrill for me.

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.

I don’t really believe in the type of pressure that people are wanting to put on the type of music that I make.

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.

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

Every day, my mom and I would watch a different Judy Garland VHS. I love how she tells a story when she sings. It was just about her voice and the words she was singing – no strings attached or silly hair or costumes, just a woman singing her heart out. I feel like that doesn’t happen that much anymore.

I’m such an emotional and sensitive person, so it only makes sense that my songs are as well.

I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world. I’ve gone through all that.

If I’d had good discipline, I might have gone into music.

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.

I do like Burial; he’s so curiously clumsy, you can’t help but be moved. It’s so un-Hollywood, and the rhythms are so un-danceable.

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

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

My purpose is to make exciting music, and I feel like I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life, so there’s no pressure.

Music has to be sort of ignorable sometimes.

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 know people said I wasn’t selling out in America, but that was entirely untrue. We sold out all over the world, and every night I looked out into the fans and those front rows that you’re talking about, the tears, the honesty, the inability to not be completely overjoyed because they felt accepted.

Yes, the Bible should be taught in our schools because it is necessary to understand the Bible if we are to truly understand our own culture and how it came to be. The Bible has influenced every part of western culture from our art, music, and history, to our sense of fairness, charity, and business.

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.

When we’re falling in love or out of it, that’s when we most need a song that says how we feel. Yeah, I write a lot of songs about boys. And I’m very happy to do that.

All of my songs are autobiographical.

Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that’s what the music is about.

Tupac, Biggie, Jay. Your usual suspects. These were the people that was played in my household.

Making music is like shopping for me. Every song is like a new pair of shoes.

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.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

The Beatles created something that never trailed off. What a gift that was to their fans. If you’re into the Beatles, you loved them from beginning to end.

Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.

It’s kind of exhilarating, walking through a crazy, insane mob. The most miraculous process is watching a song go from a tiny idea in the middle of the night to something that 55,000 people are singing back to you.

At the end of the day, who I really and truly am is a little girl who loved to play the piano.

No one tells me what to do with my music. Real. My mom doesn’t tell what to say, how is someone else going to?

I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing.

When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music. Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison?