Quotes About Artistry

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

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.

I feel there are tone singers, and there are more vocal gymnastics singers. And I think that's amazing when people can do that, but I think there's room for the tone singers. And there aren't a lot of them.

I'm a musician. I play instruments. I dabble in the hip-hop field. That doesn't take vocal ability necessarily.

The kind of vocal exaggeration that I developed was based on what key songs were in.

I don't dictate the solos and I don't dictate the vocal harmonies.

People often ask me how I developed my vocal sound, and the answer usually disappoints them: 'It's just the way I sound when I sing.'

I have never been vocal about my singing abilities, but I am always ready to present my dancing skills.

I would have to say Sam Cooke is the one I admired most. His artistry and vocal, just the way he did it.

When I was young, I put on performances for my family and my parents where I would dance like a woman, singing a really exaggerated woman's vocal in front of my whole family.

I would start seeing, in just the sense I was saying now, the kind of record it was going to be and what the arrangement demands, and what my vocal part should be in the record. This was all emerging as the song was emerging.

I never, my producer never, we never let myself just sing. We were always trying to get the perfect vocal.

The same song can have drastically different feels and personalities just by changing some minor things. A different drumbeat or some vocal overdub could completely transform the song.

I keep these songs in my head until I get behind the microphone. I never spend more than 30 or 40 minutes singing the vocal or it will sound mechanical. There are always mistakes, but it's about feeling more than being perfect.

My vocal ability is very limited, but I'm fortunate in that I can write the songs around my vocal limitations.

I definitely don't subscribe to the theory that more instruments, or more vocal tracks, harmony, or double tracking the voice, is a good thing. People do their early albums very stripped down, then each album becomes bloated.

In many ways, I've chosen to be plain, almost too plain, too self-effacing. Like, if I record a vocal and I don't like the way it sounds, I would have them turn it up and take the reverb off it to make it as plain as possible.

The problem is I'm a perfectionist, so the producer might say he's happy with my vocal take but I'll say, 'No, it can be better.' I'll do it again and again until I feel I've got the truth out of a song.

Rebecca Black might sing like a robot, but that's just proof she has evolved beyond us. Her vocal is just a slightly exaggerated version of the robot glitch-twitch stutter that's been mainstream pop vocalese for the past 10 years or so.

My music is based on melody and when I play the piano, it's as if I'm singing with them. When you try to transform that into a vocal, there was very little adjustment.

When I've produced a song, I try to record a vocal over it, and sometimes it becomes really hard. Sometimes I've already said a lot that I want to say within the production. The vocal is just adding to it, rather than it being a song.

When I sing, I go somewhere else. Every time after I sing, I'll ask, 'Did I do OK?' Because I feel like it's like my soul squeezing out of my vocal chords. I don't sit there and think about 'I'm gonna do this next...' I just sing. I sing from my heart, and my heart's got a little lonesome in it.

When I first started singing - before 'Treat Me Like Fire' when I was working with a vocal coach - I realized that I wasn't even breathing when I was singing.

You are born with a sound; everyone is, less or more. And this sound has to be developed. I am not talking about vocal technique; I am not talking about how to sing. I am talking about how to produce a sound.