Quotes About Music

Dancing all night and then vocal lessons right after was hard and not unusual - but I enjoyed it.

The short story and the truth is that I was taking vocal lessons here in New York... One day, instead of my lesson, the piano player and I went into a studio... and we put down some demos... Those demos got to Quincy Jones through an agent... He listened to them, he called me, and we started to record.

Usually when we go in to cut demos, one of us will lay down some mumbling sort of stuff for the vocal melodies because the lyrics don't come until later.

I listen to Handel's vocal music, almost exclusively.

I was doing a lot of teaching on my online guitar school and I started to use vocal melodies as a way of teaching my students. To be able to do that, I had to learn them myself.

I felt I never needed to fight for a more prominent songwriting and increased vocal role with the Cars.

'Fix' - definitely, when I first heard the demo of that song, it was kind of intimidating because of the high falsetto parts. It was one of those things. I got into the vocal booth and wasn't sure I could do it or how well I could do it. There was something about the song that I really took to.

People would call me up because they liked my voice, and they wanted some kind of vocal harmony. Sometimes I was asked to come in and sing all the harmony parts, and sometimes I would sing with other people.

When I listen to a song, I don't say, 'Oh my gosh, that vocal line she sang was the best thing I ever heard.' I'm thinking, 'That lyric just moves me. That lyric just said what I feel better than I could say it myself.'

I have a cultural map in my head, where I find similarities between different cultures. For example, domestic Japanese pop music sounds like Arabic music to me - the vocal intonations and vibrato - and, in my mind, Bali is next to New York. Maybe everyone has these geographies in their head. This is the way I've been working.

I can sample Blink-182 but put an African vocal sample in there.

Toplines usually suck. I'll send a song to a band or artist whose entire body of work I love and I'll ask them to do a vocal for one of my songs and I'll get it back and I'll hate it so much. It might have to do with my possessiveness over my music.

With vocal and choral music, first and foremost, it's the text. Not only do I need to serve the text, but the text - when I'm doing it right - acts as the perfect 'blueprint', and all the architecture is there. The poet has done the heavy lifting, so my job is to find the soul of the poem and then somehow translate that into music.

I always want to pick songs that are really crazy rangy, and sometimes those low notes aren't there. But I started taking it way more seriously after a certain point, and I started doing vocal warm-ups every day, even when I wasn't singing, sometimes twice a day.

Background scores allow me an absolute flight of the imagination, and I travel in my mind's eye. I do not like the scores to have vocal notes, because they act as a limitation to these flights of fancy.

I came from being a singer going into jazz. And that's one of the things that polio did for me is it took away my ability to sing with a range because it paralyzed my vocal chords, so that was when I started playing. But I hear the music as if I were singing even when I am playing.

When I was a kid, I used to listen to my Emerson radio late at night under the covers. I started by listening to jazz in the late 1940s and then vocal harmony groups like the Four Freshmen, the Modernaires and the Hi-Lo's. I loved Stan Kenton's big band - with those dark chords and musicians who could swing cool with individual sounds.

I learned a lot from working with and watching Knxwledge, seeing how he produces non-stop. He doesn't dwell too long on stuff. He's very simple, using only about two or three elements. I like that in production. Sometimes it doesn't take more than three drums, a melody, the vocal, looping a sample or whatever, just as minimal as possible.

My vocal style is called bel canto, which is an old Italian vocal style going back hundreds of years.

I love singing, and whenever I can sing some more vocal leads, I always covet the chance.

Just the way my voice sounds now, it's always had this little hoarse thing to it. And I'd have to do vocal exercises to make my voice clear.

It's always a pleasure when you can compose guitar parts from a strong vocal and not just put the melody on top of guitar riffs.

I do a lot of vocal warmups, which are the same warmups I did when I was a kid, because I had a few classical singing lessons and stuff like that, so I know pretty much how I'm gonna be once I get on stage.

If you are recording, you are recording. I don't believe there is such a thing as a demo or a temporary vocal.