Quotes About Music

I used to look at these pictures of trumpeters pointing their instrument to the ceiling. Stunning pictures, but if you play the trumpet and point it upwards, all the spit comes back into your mouth!

I don't quite know how the urban music category came about, but I suspect it had something to do with trying to maximise sales.

When I first put out music, people didn't know what I looked like. They called it a new type of something; they couldn't put a genre on it - it was where indie and urban kind of meet in the middle. I thought that was quite exciting.

I actually am a country music fan. I listen to a lot of Blake Shelton and Carrie Underwood and Maren Morris and Keith Urban.

I really like the whole urban, hip-hop kind of thing.

When I started out as a cover band, I was obsessed with Keith Urban and Jason Aldean and Eric Church; those are the songs I chose to sing as a cover band.

Part of my affinity with urban music comes from being on 'Kids Incorporated,' 'cos we used to sit around and listen to Chaka Khan and Prince, and I got influenced by all that. Then gangsta rap got started, and I was infatuated with that - maybe that's why I'm fascinated by guns.

After going to a few Keith Urban concerts, I thought, 'I'd really like to learn how to play guitar.' I studied Keith Urban a lot and how he performed.

When I was growing up, David Bowie was my idol. I grew up in inner-city London, and he was from Brixton, which is even more urban.

I liked the more sophisticated urban style of blues like Ray Charles and B. B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Lou Rawls; people like that with more of a tendency toward jazz.

It's an honor for me to represent urban music, reggaeton, trap and hip-hop.

Since the beginning of my recording career in 1975, I have had a little difficulty because the pop stations think I'm a jazzer who doesn't have a feeling for pop, so it's hard to get my records played. Similarly, black urban radio doesn't understand that with my R&B roots, I am more than a jazz singer. So I get pigeonholed.

At first, because this genre of music was so urban, sometimes we would sing songs that were so aggressive. And my parents didn't like it. They would break my cassettes and say, 'That music is garbage.'

Urban is not actually my world. It was me trying something out, basically. I come from a gospel background.

I did the co-writing thing all through the '90s and I got one hit out of it - a Keith Urban song called 'But For The Grace Of God' - but then I got burnt out.

I end up pleading my case to alternative programmers - you're telling me that my music is too dark for pop, too pop for alternative, and urban radio won't touch it - so we have a record that doesn't fit in. And what is more alternative than that?

I'm aware that if I make a country album and release it, and it gets on the Grammys, the Grammys are going to put it in the Urban category. Just my blackness automatically sets it in there.

I love country; I'm gonna do a country solo album at one point just 'cause. I'm a big fan of Keith Urban, Trace Adkins, Rascal Flatts, even though that's more pop. I grew up on country.

My guitar playing is a synthesis of traditional American acoustic style and Urban Pop and R&B.

Urban music in the Spanish-language is a force to be reckoned with, there's truly something for everyone in it.

I really didn't try to make an effort to make urban music, but I am a product of my inspirations.

We made history. Two Latin urban singers on the cover of Billboard is incredible. I'm proud of myself, I'm proud of J Balvin, our music, and of all Latinos.

One of the things that sells music is when the artist is looked at as someone who's come up from the streets. Not just any streets, but the toughest, meanest streets of the urban ghetto. And that's called 'street credibility.'

English urban artists were very used to making secondhand American music, and I thought that was boring.