Quotes About Upbringing

You see, I was the son of a baptist minister.

I was raised by my father, who was a singer, songwriter, guitarist, and bass player. His brothers all did the same thing, so I was kind of always raised around the music.

I grew up with this idea that songwriters had a great job. My family was Irish Catholic, so if you became a priest or a songwriter, you were golden.

My parents were both very musically inclined, they were both songwriters and musicians, so we grew up in the house singing music together, and R&B had a huge strong arm in the foundation of my career.

I grew up with singers. My father's mother sang opera. My dad was a big band singer. I can't remember a time there wasn't music in the house, so I grew up listening to great songwriters - George Gershwin, Cole Porter - and my grandma was playing opera for me before I was 3.

My parents got divorced when I was really young and I was a very hyperactive kid, so both parents independently would play Enya at the house to calm me down and soothe me as a kid.

As a child, I craved sophistication and culture. My parents didn't know what to make of me.

My children did not go through a stage of being rude to their parents. I'm sorry if that sounds incredible.

My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment - my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.

I grew up in Michigan, in the Detroit area, so cars are sort of in my DNA.

I grew up on soul music. I was a dancing little creep.

I grew up listening to a lot of soul music, and a lot of folk music.

We're Midwestern guys who grew up listening to soul music.

I grew up listening to a lot of rap music. My dad's a DJ from Brooklyn, and he's a very soulful guy, so he always spun a lot of hip-hop, and that's where I get a lot of my hip-hop influence.

I'm a product of the different - whether it be institutional racialism, whether it might be growing up in a low-income area, whether it might be, you know, coming from my mother, my father. I'm a totally different person from my mother and father, but once again I'm from them. We all have our different souls, but I'm from them.

When I was growing up, I had a nanny who would always play 'The Sound of Music' and 'Bye Bye Birdie,' so I was always listening to that stuff.

I didn't know a single musical soundtrack, really, growing up. Nobody listened to musicals. That wasn't a thing I did.

I'm not actually from Compton - I'm from South Central Los Angeles, and my father still lives in the same house I grew up in, so I'm there all the time.

I was born to a dad who was born in the South Bronx while the Bronx was burning, while landlords were committing arson to their own buildings.

I grew up in Balham in south London, and my best friend's brother was Geoffrey Robinson, who of course later became paymaster general, but at that time, he was working in politics.

I'm a girl from the South, so I was raised with morals - you know, your family's first.

My early childhood prepared me to be a social psychologist. I grew up in a South Bronx ghetto in a very poor family. From Sicilian origin, I was the first person in my family to complete high school, let alone go to college.

At the end of the day, I mean, I love my father, but I was always a mama's girl growing up. I'm from the South, so there's always something about me when I'm just with my girls or even my mother. There's just a strong connection there.

I would think, to me, growing up in the south, growing up with all the gospel music, singing in the church and having that rhythm and blues - the blues background was my big inspiration.