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

It doesn’t bother me when people try to deconstruct my songs – because at least they’re looking at the lyrics, and paying attention to the way the story is told.

We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World. And the Beatles were in the crow’s nest of that ship.

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.

This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway.

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

Rap was my drug.

I always hated how I looked on camera. I never put a face to my music, which actually made the music that much more mysterious.

I don’t want to tell President Obama how to make a speech. He’s a much better speech maker than I am. But I think always to tell the truth in a sometimes blatant way, even though it might be temporarily unpopular, is the best approach.

Hawaiian music is beautiful and simple.

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.

Funk, I don’t think I have anything to do with funk. I’ve never considered myself funky.

I don’t want to do free jazz! Because free jazz – which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering – isn’t actually free at all. It’s just constrained by what your muscles can do.

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.

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

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

I just know that I’m a fan of all different kinds of genres. You’re supposed to be free doing music, and that’s how I feel.

We need to try to unite audiences, unite countries, join musical tastes, unite people.

If you want to find the source of much of the music of modern day Russia, you will find it in the incredible compositions of that crazed lunatic Berlioz.

No one sells a song better than the person that wrote it.

When you’re singing you can hear the echo of people in the audience singing every single word with you, and that was that big dream that I had for myself. It’s happening.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

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

I love music, and after my first experience with movies, I can’t wait to do more.

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 really love the culture of hip-hop.

Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. They’re my biggest heroes. I love everything about Leonard Cohen: his lyrics and his voice. He seems like a really clever man, and Bob Dylan does as well. He’s just really cool.

You listen to Charlie Parker or John Coltrane before they found their voice, they sounded different. And when you listen to them after they found their voice on their instruments, they sound more confident and in control. Artists have that, too.

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.

Speaking purely from a musical standpoint, I think I am a great performer.

I’m wallowing in the whole idea of just being a guy out there with a band, with songs. It’s a real enjoyment.

A letdown is worth a few songs. A heartbreak is worth a few albums.

My music definitely comes from a place of experience. Everything connects to a truth.

The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years.

I’ve dreamed about doing music since I was three or four years old.

I’ll be judged on the body of work and not the popularity of any one decision.

It confuses me and disappoints me when somebody says, ‚What does he do? What does he do?‘ My records are some of the biggest anthems ever. What do you think, they magically just appear? Obama walked out to my record.

You just don’t wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

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

I’ve had mixtapes that have been better than albums I’ve heard from other artists. I take my time; I put my heart into it.

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

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.

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.

Music is like film to me.

In Puerto Rico we dance to everything.

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone’s singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person.

I was part of Jazzercise class. It was an aerobics routine accompanied by loud music, sounding quite awful to me. Jazzercise was popular in the ’80s and ’90s.

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.

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.

You pay a certain penalty for going your own way. A lot of people think you’re nuts, and you’re not as popular with girls as you should be.

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.

In high school I wanted to be a rock star and was in a lot of bands.

I just have a thing in my brain that when I’m about to do something that’s genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I’ll be like, ‚Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.‘

I have to practice to be good at guitar. I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

I used to sing songs and write with my uncle, Bill Owens.

I love good, loud speakers.

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

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

If you play an instrument, it makes you a better singer. The more you play, the better you sing, the more you sing, the better you play.

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.