Melody Gardot

I had an affinity for music and could play anything I heard on the piano, but I wasn’t scholastically advanced in any way. It was more of a habitual tendency. I would work on weekends at piano bars playing jazz when I was an art student, but the music wasn’t mine – it was covers: everything from Radiohead to really old jazz. But other than that, the only training I had was piano lessons from when I was nine until I was eleven.

For a long time I hated my body, because I was constantly suffering. But now I look at it like an old Mercedes with chrome bumpers. It costs a fortune to repair, it breaks down all the time, you can only use it once a week, the seat leather is starting to crack – but nonetheless it’s mine.

It became a kind of a game, to remember the things that had happened five minutes ago. I would start making notes about the things I was doing, on an instrument that was foreign to me, the guitar, so it was just a fun way of doing cognitive therapy. I was none the wiser to it until I began to improve and my ability to speak began to come back.

The first time I went to Paris, it just felt like I was home. I didn’t question it.

The first jazz I heard was Duke Ellington. I was learning to play classical music, but my teacher swapped out those lessons for jazz lessons because I had started adding grace notes to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.

When you make a sound, it carries on to infinity. Sound is a vibration. Vibration is energy. All of that survives in space long after we’re dead. When I walk on stage at the Wiener Staatsoper, I can feel the footsteps of Chopin and Rachmaninov.

Love is the free exercise of choice. Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other.

Sometimes the heart is deceiving.

It occurred to me that love, simply stated, is replacing the need to always be right with the need to be understanding.

I’m fine with the ups and downs in our story as long as the theme is love.

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

It’s hard to love a woman and do anything.

Love – THE FEELING – is a fruit of love, the verb.

To live is like to love – all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.

You first.’ The only way love works.

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

Loving him is like trying to hold onto an armful of balloons. Maybe I need someone to come along and pop them.

We are asleep until we fall in Love!

Love is what we’re born with. Fear is what we learned here.

I’m bad at love, but you can’t blame me for tryin’.

Jealousy, jealousy, jealousy, jealousy get the best of me.