Quotes About Artistry

Mature roles full of substance the kind played by Robert De Niro and Al Pacino - my favourite actors - is what I want to do.

I like to have songs with me that have substance. That's missing from a lot of today's music. You might hear a song with a catchy beat, but what's it about? It's not empowering or helping anyone.

I'd hate it to become style over substance, I'd hate people to start putting me in a magazine article about my style. I don't like dressing up in something I'm not necessarily comfortable in just to make it more of a show. I want the power to come from what I sing about and how I sing.

People have compared me to Lupe Fiasco, Kanye West, Eminem, and J. Cole. They bring substance and largely are all good storytellers, and those are two of my biggest strengths. It's dope to be compared to people who have longevity in the game because that's the most important thing for me: I want my name to live forever.

Patty Loveless is the big influence for me. Loving her music, loving how she wrote songs, loving the kind of songs she cut. A strong woman with true substance to her lyrics, but songs that just felt so good.

What gets people into trouble with records now is that they want to build something up without substantial musical ideas. Without that as a foundation, you can add all the layers of sound you want - it's still going to sound like a mess.

There's a lot of music out there that's like, 'I'm so mad! I'm sad! I'm into skulls and crossbones and the color black,' and that's just meaningless and shallow. So much of metal is about that and it's hard to find metal that is substantial and meaningful in terms of its content.

I used to animate. I started in animation, and you'd end every day with at least one substantive contribution.

I don't sing to people. I sing for them. I told that once to Elvis Presley. He bought it. After that Elvis sang not to but for the audience. A subtle difference.

I find I can write for two lines, and then I have nothing else to say. For me, the only way to find something comes through the sentence level and sticking with the sentences that give a subtle feeling that there's something more to say.

We didn't care if we were well-liked as long as the movies were good. We served the movie - that was our master at Miramax. In our second incarnation, the movie is still the master but we're getting the same results in more subtle ways.

I feel, in a way, on a record, you can be more subtle. In the live setting, everything gets amplified. The dynamics are more extreme in concert.

I get really excited when I see filmmakers make something that is subtle and feels real. It is really tough to do right.

I'm almost sometimes too subtle in my acting.

Being a Kathak dancer, learning Bharathanatyam was a challenge as it was not that subtle, when compared to my natural form of dance.

I learnt to keep my acting subtle.

Leon Theremin's original designs are elegant, ingenious and effective. As electronics goes, the theremin is very simple. But there are so many subtleties hidden in the details of the design. It's like a great sonnet, or a painting, or a speech, that is perfectly done on more than one level.

I wanted to develop a guitar style where phrases and lines get there just in the nick of time, like with Curtis Mayfield and Steve Cropper. Subtleties mean so much, and there is a stunning beauty in them.

What I was going for in the first two albums I didn't necessarily achieve. Because I was young and because it was my first time out. And the second album was such a 'quickie' sort of 'Let's just get it over with!' But the kind of music I make, there's a lot of subtlety in it. And I think it takes a couple of listens to actually really get it.

I like songs with a lot of heart and feeling and subtlety.

I try to be careful how much I sing about the suburban house or whatever.

I have to pay a huge price to express myself. You get people asking to take photos all the time; you can't ride the subway... I still ride the subway, but there's always people sneaking photos or coming up to you.

Music has become a bigger business, and with that there is more pressure to succeed; I think that it creates a negative pressure for being creative.

I admire writers who succeed at what I consider the first demand of art: that the artist vivisect himself without pity, without hesitation, determined to reveal whatever he might find.