Quotes from Gregory Porter

I like to absorb the atmosphere and explore wherever I'm working or visiting, so I can't say there's any type of place I don't like. When you travel you have to be open to new experiences.

A Change Is Gonna Come' has always been a powerful song for me as it comes from a place of vulnerability.

On stage, it's very naked. There's a reason you shake your knees. You're very vulnerable, cos it's just you, your body is the instrument. But I always had confidence in my voice, if I had the right song, the right words to sing.

I lose my bags all the time. Sometimes for two months. One of the worst times was when I had come from France and I had packed cheese, because I was really crazy about camembert, so I have this really nice suit that stinks of camembert, no matter how many times I dry clean it.

I can sing the blues and I have sung the blues. I feel it internally when I'm singing.

Writing from a personal experience can bring about this emotion and power of emotion that can be instantly connected to the instrument, my voice.

I can be a bit nerdy so I need a good, clearly marked map, as you can miss out on some of the coolest places in Amsterdam if you don't have a wander down the little side streets.

I love wandering around the vintage shops.

My part of Brooklyn has always been a very warm neighbourhood, even before I had anything going on in the music industry. When I step out of my house to go for coffee on Saturday mornings, I might say hi to 20 people before I get to the cafe. I think they feel they own me, in a way.

There were some things in my childhood I thought we'd put to sleep. The idea of one race's supremacy over another. I thought the issue of colour would be put to sleep by the time I had a son. And that's maybe why I had a kid so late.

It's been some surreal moments, you know from performing at Buckingham Palace to having dinner with Stevie Wonder, it's been an amazing ride.

Waving to the Queen after singing Amazing Grace at Buckingham Palace, that was pretty cool.

My overwhelming memory of my childhood is the constant busyness in the house. I am seventh out of eight kids - five boys and three girls - plus my mom, Ruth.

The voice is probably supposed to have some cracks and pops and some mistakes in it.

My grandmother and my mother and my grandfather, their style of praying was - all day long, they would pray by singing and humming.

All the events that have made up the character and fabric of British culture and everything that has happened to make up the fabric of America culture - art and music - includes the faces and the colours of a lot of people.

How can you sing a line like, 'I've fallen out of love' when you're 18? You need to experience something of life before you can sing it.

Being a singer, it's feast or famine. You have to hit it when it's hot.

The umbrella of jazz is so big and so wide . If you don't like saxophone, try a vocalist, if you don't like vocalists, try guitar.

Whether you like punk, grunge, or early rock and roll, there's probably something in there you've been living with your whole life and you didn't even know it was jazz.

This is one of the major purposes of soul and jazz music; to state what you feel.

You'd think we'd be exhausted by that rhetoric but you're still able to move people with fear and fright and lies that somebody's going to take your place, that in order for someone to rise, you have to fall.

You know Bakersfield was full of workers from the south, from Texas and Arkansas, and they brought their gospel and blues with them. And that's the sound I grew with.

I'm very thankful to San Diego for the musical opportunities it gave me.