Quotes About Artistry

Children make up the best songs, anyway. Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don't care if they lose it; they'll just make another one.

There's nothing more embarrassing than a person who tries to guess what the great American public would like, makes a compromise for the first time, and falls flat on his face… I would rather be a failure on my own terms than a success on someone else's. That's a difficult statement to live up to, but then I've always believed that the way you affect your audience is more important than how many of them are there.

Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.

Song-forms are just like jello molds, ya know? I like goofing around. [ Pour some flavor in there? ] Yeah; and wait for it to sit.

When you're doing the traditional musicals, singing songs that are 40 and 50 years old, you realize there's a reason why those musicals are hits. These are amazing songs!

Amy King is a true bard.

Everything starts and ends with the song, and working with writers and really learning their process and craft was an invaluable experience.

Like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.

Soy lo suficientemente artista para dibujar libremente con mi imaginación. La imaginación es más importante que el conocimiento. El conocimiento es limitado. La imaginación abarca el mundo".

People assume that all artists make for terrible business people, but I'm in complete charge of my own career.

If I was writing songs just for me I'd only play them in my living room, alone.

I don't see music as working.

There's a side to this industry that nurtures divas who can't write. It's a big business.

Well, I have a lot of food references in my work.

Musically, I always allow myself to jump off of cliffs. At least that's what it feels like to me. Whether that's what it actually sounds like might depend on what the listener brings to the songs.

A guitarist or a drummer can get a cold and still play; I get a cold and sound like a wet mitten trying to sing you a love song. Charming.

As soon as you stop being humbled by the creation process, Little One, it is so much bigger than you are. And when you think it is you and you are it, it will drown you or burn you alive.

But over the years you can cultivate hate for the art you love.

A time came later in my youth when I had to find the bridge between the aspects of playing music that constituted communication with myself, and performance. That's when I got a repertoire together, things that people would like. This is why I've done covers over the years.

Many contemporary composers have been building walls of sounds following their own clever devices. But then, who lives inside those rooms?

I've made club songs, and I've made radio songs, and I've made the car songs.

Master of Cake?

There are ways of entering the dream / The way a painter enters a studio: / To spill.

I can play punk rock, and I love playing punk rock, but I was into every other style of music before I played punk rock.