Alanis Morissette

Unless I really loved it and felt really passionate about it, I would just kind of abort the song and start a new one.

It’s when someone has an agenda of their own for the record that it doesn’t work for me.

Making a movie requires 20 to 500 people to make and a lot of money and the stakes are a lot higher.

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.

Down the road, I’ll probably have a kid or two or three. And there will probably be political events or spiritual things to comment on, and humor.

I was motivated by just thinking that if you had all this external success that everyone would love you and everything would be peaceful and wonderful.

Blues purists never cared for me. I don’t worry about it. I think if it this way: When I made ‘Three O’ Clock Blues,’ they were not there. The people out there made the tune. And blues purists just wrote about it. The people is who I’m trying to satisfy.

In our local Baptist church, I sang in the choir and formed a gospel quartet. When our minister caught me messing with his guitar, he taught me three positions – one, four and five. After that, I taught myself to play.

No two people on earth are alike, and it’s got to be that way in music or it isn’t music.

I’m sure critics have their purpose, and they’re supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what he did.

There’s only two types of music. The stuff you can write down and the stuff you can’t. The stuff that you can’t write down is Jazz. Everything else is Polka.

You don’t know what love is, until you’ve learned the meaning of the blues, until you’ve loved a love you’ve had to lose.

I don’t care much about music. What I like is sounds.

My job is to write songs that have emotional meaning to me.

I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one of those people.

I’ve tried all my life to avoid copying. If I can’t be myself, there’s no point being in Jazz.

If you understood everything I say, you’d be me!

Musicians have a really big part to play in spreading messages because they’re able to reach a large portion of people on an emotional level. Artists reach people at their heart; it’s the only time we meet in one place and put our differences aside. When you’re in a forum listening to music, all you feel in that moment is love and the understanding.

When I start writing songs and it turns into an overly belabored intellectual process, I just throw it out.

Jazz music is the real deal.

The point of Jazz is, you do something and then you go on.