I’m putting out this free music, constantly putting it out.

I’m not claiming divinity. I’ve never claimed purity of soul. I’ve never claimed to have the answers to life. I only put out songs and answer questions as honestly as I can… But I still believe in peace, love and understanding.

My grandfather once ventured upon publishing a volume of hymns. I never heard anyone speak in their favour or argue that they ought to have been sung in the congregation. In that volume, he promised a second if the first should prove acceptable. We forgive him the first collection because he did not inflict another.

Years ago, when I first started being a big star, I had fans that were fanatical. It was when ‚Jolene‘ was a big hit.

I rate Morrissey as one of the best lyricists in Britain. For me, he’s up there with Bryan Ferry.

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.

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

The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.

Music is the art of the prophets and the gift of God.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

I love story songs because I’ve always loved books.

Your personal history is a part of what happens with your hands and your head as you play music.

Sing me a new song; the world is transfigured; all the Heavens are rejoicing.

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

I still wanna rap better than everybody else, and I wanna say important things.

I would say that jazz is my own language.

My songwriting is like extending a hand to the listener.

With music, you often don’t have to translate it. It just affects you, and you don’t know why.

Music comes to me more readily than words.

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.

The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.

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.

Fill the earth with your songs of gratitude.

When I was in high school, there were these British blues-rock-type bands with really good guitar players that would jam on one song for half an hour. And as much as I was amazed by some of those guitar players, seeing them prompted me to make a note that that’s not something I could do.

If you ever see young artists, and they’re not sounding good, they sound good. They’re good singers. They wouldn’t be where they are if they didn’t sound good. It’s their nerves. Any time you see your favorite artist, and he’s or she’s screwing up or not hitting those notes, it’s not because she can’t hit it or she can’t sing; he or she is scared.

I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit.

I enjoy singing my songs in front of people.

Music is something no one can control.

My mother knew how to read music and everything. But I just kinda learned off of records. And so, I was listening to records and I’d play ‚em over and over.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

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

I have to work really hard to get the record deal – I have to spend years at it to get good. I have to practice to be good at guitar.

I’m not into albums that are meant to sound perfect.

Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches – he has made music sick.

I can’t make a song for a particular person or demographic. If I love it, I’m gonna do it. I have to perform it for the rest of my life. A song is like a tattoo – you can never get away from it.

Music is really driving my whole life.

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

When I’m 40 and nobody wants to see me in a sparkly dress anymore, I’ll be like: ‚Cool, I’ll just go in the studio and write songs for kids.‘

I can play a lot of different instruments adequately but nothing really well.

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

Fans are my favorite thing in the world. I’ve never been the type of artist who has that line drawn between their friends and their fans. The line’s always been really blurred for me. I’ll hang out with them after the show. I’ll hang out with them before the show. If I see them in the mall, I’ll stand there and talk to them for 10 minutes.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

Songs for me are like a message in a bottle. You send them out to the world, and maybe the person who you feel that way about will hear about it someday.

‚Bellyache‘ is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren’t real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don’t know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.

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.

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

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.

My music is a luxury.

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

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 love good, loud speakers.

Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

When I’m writing, I’m thinking about how the songs are going to play live. Fifty bars of rap don’t translate onstage. No matter how potent the music, you lose the crowd. They want a hook; they want to sing your stuff back to you.

Music is the voice that tells us that the human race is greater than it knows.

When I was performing the songs on ‚Kiss Land,‘ it was a great singalong. But there were moments where I realized some parts were catchier than the others. There’s maybe two choruses on all of ‚Kiss Land.‘

Hip-hop saved my life, man. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been even decent at. I don’t know how to do anything else.

I think that by staying true to myself and making music from my heart, the blessings come.

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

If I was just a fan of music, I would think that I was the number one artist in the world.

So there’s nothing more provocative than taking a genre that everybody who’s cool hates – and then making it cool.

I wanted to be Gerry Mulligan, only, see, I didn’t have any kind of technique. So I thought, well, baritone sax is kind of easier; I can manage that – except I couldn’t afford a baritone, so I bought an alto, which was the same fingering.