Quotes About Authenticity

One of the most important things to me as a songwriter is to make music that's young and fresh but also soulful and real. I want people to feel like they know me once they listen to my songs.

For me, one of the downfalls of electronic music is that it can feel a little soulless or robotic.

Garage rock is music for older people with young souls and young people with old souls. It's a certain sensibility, and you may have it when you're 17 or when you're 67.

I think actors are brave souls that have to use parts of themselves that I'm just not comfortable doing anymore.

Everything about the movie 'Dope' is real artistry, and everybody put their full hearts and souls into it. It's a passion project; it's not one of those things everybody got paid a million dollars to do. Everybody on there wanted to do it. Everybody there believed in the project, and we just went for it. We all love each other.

When I was younger, I was impressed by those who were educated, accomplished, successful, and applauded by the world. But over the years, I have come to the realization that I am far more impressed by those wonderful and blessed souls who are truly good and without guile.

I don't have perfect pitch. My drums sound like a drummer, not a drum machine.

I like things that don't sound particularly processed or mechanical or made by machines. I like music that contains human elements, with all their flaws. There's air in it, and you can hear a room of a bunch of guys playing. Those are the magic parts.

My songs always sound a lot better in person than they do on the record.

I want to be the biggest thing that's out because I'm different from everybody. I don't sound like nobody.

We gotta keep our sound alive, that dark hip-hop.

If you try to sound like somebody else, it will never work because we already have that person. You are noticed when you try to be an original sound.

When you got a sound that don't sound like nobody else and it's brand new, you've got to feed it to 'em. You've got to force it on 'em.

You can't just plug your guitar in your computer and make it sound like an old record.

Listen to 'Dream.' It's just me all the way. It's like raw. It's gutter. It's real. It's authentic. It ain't like nobody else. Don't sound like nobody else, no nothing.

It's always nice to hear people say, 'You sound the same,' when I know I don't.

I don't want to sound self-righteous, and I don't want to act like I have it all put together.

I can be a different person at different moments. I may sound chatty and friendly but that could really be a reserved person trying hard not to appear to be an introvert.

You listen to Black Sabbath with Ronnie James Dio in it, and it's not Black Sabbath. They should have just called it 'Heaven and Hell' right from the beginning. Because you listen to that 'Heaven and Hell' album, that doesn't sound anything close to Black Sabbath.

Neo-soul is really less about a sound than it is about a look, in my opinion.

This isn't meant to make me sound interesting and rock 'n' roll, but I wouldn't want to live with me a lot of the time.

I feel like I have to create the Keith Whitley sound. That doesn't mean I can't borrow from the people I grew up listening to, but it doesn't serve any purpose to sing the same kind of songs they sang. When you do that, it's going to come out sounding like an imitation, whether it's meant to or not.

Some people rehearse to a point where they're robotic, and they sound like they have memorized their presentation and didn't take it to the next level. Going from sounding memorized and canned to sounding natural is a lot of work.

I never have used any other artist as a model for a sound or a song. It always has to come from an emotion, and capturing the essence of that emotion in a song.