Quotes About Artistry

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

Being an artist doesn't start because you're 21, and it doesn't end because you're 51. You are who you are until the day you die.

When Ando arrives in the studio, he picks up his pen even before he gets a cup of tea, and he stays seated until the very last train at night. He hardly eats, just nibbles at little balls of rice at his desk.

My creativity is an entity unto its own.

Every Dirty Projectors album is a world unto itself.

Certainly there is, for the American Negro artist who can escape the restrictions the more advanced among his own group would put upon him, a great field of unused material ready for his art.

I'm kind of floating out there as an artist. I'm in a safe place where I can play a girlfriend or a best friend or a mommy or a lawyer, but a huge part of me is unused. I'm classically trained, historically inclined and somewhat revolutionary by nature, so I'm frustrated as an artist.

Every now and then there might be a beat someone turned down that I have as an unused beat. But everything that predominantly matches the artist in my 30 years of doing this, it was me walking in and sitting there with no drums, no samples, no nothing, and making a beat on the spot.

Singing in character you can be more of a show off or more modest because it isn't yourself it's a nice way to sing, unusual, a bit like being in musical I guess.

What I do is unusual: chordal movements that have never been used before, changing keys and modalities mid-song.

It's very unusual to be playing something other than human.

When I was singing in Helen, the style was to have a really unusual voice. The order of the day was to have emotion and passion and a recognizable style.

In my experience, as a young black artist, you have to fulfill an archetype, or be a token - and I was unwilling to do that.

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

I go for as much feeling as I can rather than show what I can do up and down the neck. I don't play to show people ability.

All you can do as an artist is just strive to make the best record you can and ride the rollercoaster as it goes up and down.

I cannot switch my voice. My voice is not like an elevator going up and down.

I walk like a duck: very straight up and down. Or like a penguin. It's a dead giveaway that I'm a dancer.

I definitely don't see myself as much of a singer, because my upbringing is really based around the guitar, learning chord progressions and that sort of thing. So the singing aspect of what I do has been a secondary adventure.

My upbringing and my daily day-to-day struggles and emotions make up most of my music.

I think, as musicians, our music should be who we are. Sometimes it's not - it's someone else's. All heartfelt music and all honest music, it's who we are. Of course, our upbringing has everything to do with it.

Fashion should have a transgressive nature; it can make you feel like someone else, give you heightened emotion. It should bring you joy and uplift you.

Sometimes before we make a record I go back and listen to a few. It's equally humbling and uplifting.