Man, that record came out and was real big in Memphis. They started playing it, and it got real big. Don’t know why-the lyrics had no meaning.

If people take anything from my music, it should be motivation to know that anything is possible as long as you keep working at it and don’t back down.

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.

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

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

Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

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

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

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.

When I listen to the radio, I just hear so much music that doesn’t even sound like people. The vocals are all tuned, and the drums are all fake.

I was a super-duper Tupac fan, and I realized later, when I became a huge Nas fan and a huge Eminem fan, I was drawn to the storytellers. They all told stories in different ways, but they were all like the best storytellers.

All of my songs are autobiographical.

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

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 always say I wanna work with Alicia Keys. I’m in awe of her.

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.

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

I grew up listening to the Police, I grew up performing in bars, singing Police songs.

Rap was more of a release for me, a journal.

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.

I kinda like the idea of having an album that’s all me.

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

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

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

Cause I’m a musician, I’m not really good at posing and being a model, like, modeling.

My nails are my rhythm section when I’m writing a song all alone. Some day, I may cut an album, just me and my nails.

I didn’t want to play it boring and safe. I also didn’t want to innovate too much. Second albums, man, they’re even scarier than first ones.

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.

How to play music may be known. At the commencement of the piece, all the parts should sound together. As it proceeds, they should be in harmony while severally distinct and flowing without break, and thus on to the conclusion.

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.

I’d like to do a completely off-the-wall collaboration. I would like one of my songs to be the hook to a rap song. That would be so much fun!

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

Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.

I’m not going to make a song just to make a song. The day that I make an album, it’s so that people really know what Bad Bunny’s about.

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

I really like Lady GaGa and everything she is for her fans.

My songs are like my children – I expect them to support me when I’m old.

I wanted to be in a punk band before I had even heard any punk music.

I just love Bowie. I think he’s the ultimate inventor.

I make good music for long journeys.

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

I listen to music that is of our time and I just get angry.

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

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

I’ve never thought about songwriting as a weapon. I’ve only thought about it as a way to help me get through love and loss and sadness and loneliness and growing up.

My mami and papi love my music. They’re always listening to the radio waiting for one of my songs to come on. And when it does, they turn up the volume – and turn it back down when it’s over.

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

I booked my first studio at like 12 or 13. Somewhere in that season of my life, singing along with the radio became me wanting to be on radio, you know. And writing Langston Hughes replica poems became me wanting to write like Stevie Wonder.

‚Thursday‘ is a conceptual album. Whatever that situation was, I spent the whole album focusing on that situation.

We don’t make music – it makes us.

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.

I love making music. That’s what I love to do. So I don’t feel like there’s any need to take a break unless I want to.

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

You listen to the radio and all the songs sound the same, from 8 in the morning to 12.

Once music ceases to be ephemeral – always disappearing – and becomes instead material… it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.

Songs don’t have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I’ve done is about alienation… about where you fit in society.

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

I own a ’66 Jaguar. That’s the guitar I polish, and baby – I refuse to let anyone touch it when I jump into the crowd.

I’ve rarely seen video screens used well in a music concert.