Quotes About Creativity

David Bowie has always been my vocal inspiration ever since I was a child.

Sometimes, to be honest with you, our lyrics were written a day before the vocal had to be done.

I do loads of pitch writing as well, where you write a pop song and then pitch it to DJs who can then work with the song, and sometimes they keep your vocal on it. It's just good to be involved in different things.

I know as far as I'm concerned, I'm getting really excited about writing, and I'm taking guitar and vocal lessons.

If you see a credit with just my name on it, that means I write absolutely everything: rhythm guitar parts, guitar melodies, vocal melodies... absolutely everything, really.

I can do the vocal acrobatics but I really try not to. I've always been drawn to singers who sing it like it is, pure, straight down the line: Ella Fitzgerald, Patti Smith, Carole King. Simplicity is really important to me.

Being a mom makes it harder to find time to write and it gets harder to find time to sit down and do a vocal, because there's a baby behind you crying.

Usually what I do is I write my vocal melody over guitar parts and then I come up with lyrics.

I never start a song at the beginning; I always start in the middle, working with the original concept. That might be a loop or a vocal hook. A weird noise or a string sample. Once that's at the heart of the song, I work concertina-fashion, expanding the song forwards to the end and backwards to the beginning.

Because I'm a Christian, when I write things are going to have a certain flavor. When you're writing songs you try to be careful. You make sure there are no conflicts with what you believe, especially when you've been real vocal about being a Christian.

A lot of people with a range of styles and vocal tones make all kinds of music for all sorts of audiences. I'll be forever grateful for that.

The music I want to hear in my head sounds somewhere between Jimi Hendrix and Massive Attack. It's not really like my dad, but there will always be similarities because we have the same vocal cords, and I learnt the guitar the way he taught me.

I'm not the type of woman who shows off my body; I'm a vocalist and I'm a writer and I think people see that more so than they see anything else. That's just who I am.

I try to find a vocalist that I don't have to make better. I try to find a vocalist that can make me better, and in turn, I can make them better so that we are, as a team, making ourselves better. I like the vocalist to challenge me. I love to challenge a vocalist.

Van Morrison is probably, at this point in time, my biggest influence as a vocalist. When we were making our last album I had a vinyl copy of 'Veedon Fleece' in the vocal booth in front of me, in the dorky sense. I think there were candles around, which is really tacky, but hey, I needed to channel Van the Man!

In any event, I'm proud to wear the badge of jazz vocalist if that's what people want to call me; but at the same time, there are many other things I like to do.

With 'A Million Miles,' I still was proving myself as a writer and as a vocalist. It gave me the platform to tour again.

Often, when I work with a vocalist, I like to focus on the melodies first.

I hate that when you introduce yourself, and you're a rapper, sometimes you gotta say, 'I'm a musician.' Or, 'I'm an artist.' 'I'm a recording artist.' 'I'm a vocalist.'

I make records from top to bottom. Bring the best out of the vocalist. I deal with live instrumentation on all our records.

'Somebody That I Used to Know,' like a lot of the record, was a bit of a struggle to finish. It was written fairly quickly - I wrote it in November 2010 - but it took six months to find Kimbra and really realize she was the right vocalist to make the female part come to life. There were constant hurdles.

I get to focus on being a musician sometimes, and I get to focus on being a vocalist sometimes.

When you think of rock and roll and metal, a lot of it is based around the riff. If you can sing over the riff and what the arrangements are going to be like, you have to leave space for what most people consider one of the most key essential parts, which is the vocalist.

The only thing I could do was play music, because I'd studied classical guitar, trumpet and piano at the American School in Alexandria. So I started out with two other boys in little clubs in Athens. I became a singer by default when our lead vocalist was late one night. Someone had to sing.