Quotes About Songbook

Donna Summer was one of the strongest female singers in pop music. She was very underrated as a vocalist and a writer, and her songbook is just outrageous.

The Psalter occupied an enormous place in the life of our Lord. He used it as His prayer book in the Jewish synagogue during His whole life. It was His songbook in all the temple festivals. He sang from it after the Last Supper.

My style of music is the great American songbook meets the pop world of the Seventies and Eighties.

Presenting the American songbook as a living, breathing entity that's expanding all the time is very important.

I publish my own music. I'm creating my own songbook. It works that way for me; I'm very independent.

For many years, I've always been attached to what they call the Great American Songbook, and Kern was a great leader of that because he had the classical training of Europe. He impressed all the greatest composers, like Cole Porter and Gershwin. They couldn't believe he was writing the songs he was writing.

In America, at the beginning of talkies, they pulled Fred Astaire from the theaters and put him on the screen and had all of these great composers write songs for him. They call it the Great American Songbook; I call it the Fred Astaire Songbook because they were written for him.

As a teenager, in my songbook, I used to script what my lighting would be like. I used to dance in my roo;, it was like putting myself in a trance, and making myself feel good about things, almost like a private ceremony of begging people to like you.

Even though a lot of people have recorded 'Unchained Melody' - Elvis Presley, Roy Hamilton, Frank Sinatra, LeAnn Rimes, Diana Ross and the Supremes come to mind - I don't think I'd like to cut it in the studio. I've had plenty of opportunities to record songs from the Great American Songbook, but 'Unchained Melody' has never been one I've picked.

As we'd slogged away for weeks on the Convention Hall stage in isolation, trying to pump life into our much-vaunted songbook, there'd been only one thing missing: you.

I'm an American songbook guy, though I've got eclectic tastes. I really love the American songbook. I've taken up the ukulele, and so you can play 'Five Foot Two' and Hawaiian music, but you can also do some of the great tunes, like 'You Go to My Head,' 'I Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry,' 'Taking a Chance on Love.'

My initial training was on the keyboard - mainly the great American songbook. In junior high, during the day, I was a classical clarinetist, but after school, I played New Orleans jazz and big-band music.

I've been doing a lot of studying singing, and I'm thinking of recording an album containing all my old war horses and putting out a songbook at the same time.