Diana Krall

The greatest thing about music is putting it out there for people to figure out.

You want the listener to find the song on their own, give too much away and it takes away from the imagination.

I’ve sung a lot of emotional songs, but when you’re writing it’s very difficult to decide what to reveal.

What we do as artists is a combination of experience and imagination. How that creeps into your work is not so linear.

I’m not really on a mission to tell anybody anything. I’d rather be figured out.

Love songs last because they are about feelings that don’t change.

If I’m not a jazz player all the time, I’ve at least been cued in to what I do by jazz.

Silence is what makes music sexy. I just move blocks of silence around. The notes are an afterthought.

You could still improvise but do it with lyrics.

I never have any trouble playing anything I can think of. The trouble is thinking of what to play.

Music’s been around a long time, and there’s going to be music long after Ray Charles is dead. I just want to make my mark, leave something musically good behind. If it’s a big record, that’s the frosting on the cake, but music’s the main meal.

I could see that Bukka was born to be a bluesman, and I wondered if the same was true of me. I worried that I didn’t have his talent – or the talent of someone like Blind Lemon or T-Bone. I felt something beautiful inside Bukka’s soul. Even if I didn’t follow his style, I was moved by his sincerity. He loved telling stories, and used his blues to tell them. His blues was the book of his life. He sang about his rough times and fast time and loving times and angry times. He’d entertain at a party for two hundred people with the same enthusiasm as a party for twenty. Bukka gave it his all. His music had a consistency I admired. Like all the great bluesmen, he said, I am what I am. I wondered if I could be that steady and strong.

The way I feel today, as long as my health is good and I can handle myself well and people still come to my concerts, still buy my CDs, I’ll keep playing until I feel like I can’t.

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

What I look for in concert is a connection with the audience.

It’s either hip or it ain’t.

People now have been conditioned to believe they should only buy one song at a time, that nobody can make an entire record that would merit you paying, you know, $7, $8, $10 when CDs in the ’90s were $18, $19 and people bought millions and millions and millions of them.

Typically I go in the studio and whatever I’m contemplating that day will wind up being a song. I don’t come in with lyrics… I just go in and let it happen.

By and large Jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.

It’s very difficult for me to dislike an artist. No matter what he’s creating, the fact that he’s experiencing the joy of creation makes me feel like we’re in a brotherhood of some kind… we’re in it together.

Don’t say Aretha is making a comeback, because I’ve never been away!