A lot of music influences me in other ways than this, but I’ve always taken a lot of influence from Stevie Wonder, Frank Ocean, and Jeff Rosenstock for the Rex music. They were also the first three artists that released albums where I enjoyed every song.
Conceptually, I am open to mistakes – errors, actually. I do play lots of wrong notes while I am making some music, and a mistake or a wrong note is like a gift for me: ‘Oh, wow, an unknown sound or an unknown harmony. I didn’t know about this.’
The Italians and Spanish, the Chinese and Vietnamese see food as part of a larger, more essential and pleasurable part of daily life. Not as an experience to be collected or bragged about – or as a ritual like filling up a car – but as something else that gives pleasure, like sex or music, or a good nap in the afternoon.
Everyone has their own path in life, no matter if it’s being a celebrity or a singer. Quite frankly, I didn’t move to Nashville and tell myself I wanted to be a singer because I wanted to be a celebrity or I wanted to be somebody that people admired. I wasn’t about that. I just loved music.
R&B is the one thing that has influenced every kind of music. Every artist that there is, from those that are sung the most to Adele – you know, she was so influenced by so many R&B artists and soul music – it’s clear in her writing that that’s where it comes from.
Jazz music is America’s past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.
I’m a big online everything. But for me, shopping online started with music, obviously, then it went onto books, meditation CDs, and I just recently bought these electronic cigarettes. My husband is trying to quit smoking, so I went online and I bought those BluCigs cigarettes in every flavor for him.
I know that when it comes to your friends, especially in the music industry, we work so much and do so much that we don’t even really keep track of our days, or keep track of our health, or keep track of our mental health. Sometimes we just go astray.
This person loves tangerines, This person loves raspberries – and my son won’t even look at berries. Isn’t that amazing? And so I have to apply that to music; otherwise, I would always hide in a hole because of all the people that don’t like Coldplay.
I wish we could not ever get recognised on the streets, do no selfies, and still perform music all over the world. Unfortunately I don’t think that’s going to be the case, but I’m doing my best to just keep my feet on the ground and my eyes on the prize.
Searching for music is like searching for God. They’re very similar. There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.
I think the path is different for everybody. Go after the doors that are open to you. That has always been my motto getting into the music business. Do the things that seem to be good opportunities and work hard at it. Try to make good decisions and be nice. Hopefully all of that will pay off at some point.
If I pick up a guitar, I don’t practise scales. I never have. I come up with something I haven’t done before, new approaches to chord sequences, riffs, rhythms, so it becomes composition. It’s not like the music I’m doing is just a single thread.
That’s why this generation is the least racist generation ever. You see it all the time. Go to any club. People are intermingling, hanging out, having fun, enjoying the same music. Hip-hop is not just in the Bronx anymore. It’s worldwide. Everywhere you go, people are listening to hip-hop and partying together. Hip-hop has done that.
A lot of people want to blow up as a producer, but what helps you blow up as a producer is an artist that matches well with your music. When that artist gets popular and blowing up, and people start knowing them, that’s when they start knowing you.
Everything comes out in blues music: joy, pain, struggle. Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance. It’s about a man and a woman. So the pain and the struggle in the blues is that universal pain that comes from having your heart broken. Most blues songs are not about social statements.
Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left.
I was raised in a very humble environment, and I was always taught to be humble to the things that are happening in my life because they’re blessings. They’re blessings in every way. Whether you’re able to help someone get through a tough time in their life through your music or through comedy, or whatever it is, you’re just a channel.
I don’t care what people think of me, unless they think I’m mean or something, but I don’t care if they think I’m like someone else because I know I’m not – I’m a total weirdo. I’m not selling a dream; I’m not selling fame like it is some sort of fantastic thing. I’m just trying to sell music and get on with my real life.
Music is like a conversation. One person says one thing that speaks with a harmonica, with a bass, with a drum. They’re all conversating, and we’re just trying to find a way to make conversation rather than blah, blah, blah. But it’s not really so hard a thing to do if you know the way to approach it.
My main goal in life is to be happy. If I can make other people happy by doing what I love, then I feel like I’ve done everything in life that I’ve wanted. I just want to make people feel good and change people’s lives with music, and that’s it.
One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people’s heads as they listen in the car. You don’t have to memorize a Paul Simon song; it’s just in your head, and you can sing along. With a poem, you have to will yourself to memorize it.
I grew up listening to a lot of player-piano music in my house and a lot of old Tin Pan Alley songs and American standards. My dad listened to a lot of traditional Irish music and I grew up doing musical theater. So most of the music I was exposed to as a kid was pre-rock n’ roll.
Racism is taught in the home. We agree on that? Well, it’s very hard to teach racism to a teenager who’s listening to rap music and who idolizes, say, Snoop Dogg. It’s hard to say, ‘That guy is less than you.’ The kid is like, ‘I like that guy, he’s cool. How is he less than me?
I thought I was going to be an actor. I liked entertaining. I was pretty much tap dancing for attention from a very early age. My family was kind of musical, and there were people in the circus next door and actors across the road. I just enjoyed messing around with music growing up, but I really thought I was going to be an actor.
