Melody Gardot

I learned to play guitar on my lying back while I was bed-ridden. I only thought to record the songs because sometimes I would I couldn’t remember what I had just done. Eventually I started singing, because I thought if I sang it that would help to remember even more. But I wasn’t trying to sing. And then one day-this is really weird -I just wrote a song. It came out at a rapid rate and I recorded it and I listened back to it and was like ‘Wow, it’s a tune’.

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.

The honest truth is that every day was new, every day was a challenge, every day was starting from a fresh place, and as time went on, over the course of about two years, things became better and better. But I don’t think that there was for me anything like, ‘Ah, this is taking too long’, because ‘long’ didn’t exist. So I see it as a blessing. I have to laugh. I mean there’s no other way to look at it.

For me an album cover is like a movie poster. I wanted an image that was pure femininity, which could please a sculptor. I went through a lot of suffering. But managing to stand up nude on stage carrying a guitar is a victory.

I think that age is irrelevant. We’re all pretty much spiritual beings – I consider myself to be about eighty-five. I feel like I’m ancient, like two thousand years old.

Music is the most fantastic drug there is!

When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it’s composition.

Music is the shorthand of emotion

They always want to sell me as a hard bopper.

Sometimes there are no gigs, but the main thing is still the music.

All that I’ve played, all that I’ve sung, I couldn’t have done any other way.

Let me whisper it. Let me sigh it. Let me sing it, my dear or I will cry it.

I was unfashionable before anyone knew who I was.

I let my body play what’s in my heart. I play life instead of notes. I play what I lived.

You could go out and eat and come back and the note would still be playing.

You can separate the men from the boys and ballads.

My first relationship to any kind of musical situation is as a listener.

If you feel like tapping your feet, tap your feet.

And as long as people have problems, the blues can never die.

The wonderful thing about Jazz is its willingness to take chances.

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.