Alanis Morissette

I’ll keep evolving and put that into my songs.

I remember thinking during those times that I wanted to write in a way where there are no rules.

I love songs that are very autobiographical.

What’s that line from TS Eliot? To arrive at the place where you started, but to know it for the first time. I’m able to write about a breakup from a different place. Same brokenness. Same rock-bottom. But a little more informed, now I’m older. Thank God for growing up.

Then I realized that secrecy is actually to the detriment of my own peace of mind and self, and that I could still sustain my belief in privacy and be authentic and transparent at the same time. It was a pretty revelatory moment, and there’s been a liberating force that’s come from it.

And I always laugh at that, because I think I’ve always been doing what I want to do since Day 1.

He knows I rip him off every day. He’s the godfather for me. Nobody can say they aren’t influenced by what Stevie Wonder has done.

I never thought Jazz was meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic.

Jazz stresses less on technical exhibitionism and much more on emotional content.

Jazz never ends… it just continues.

They’re not particular about whether you’re playing a flatted fifth or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance to it.

If you really understand the meaning of be-bop, you understand the meaning of freedom.

Everybody has somebody that they patterned themselves after.

Music is like wine, the less you know about it the sweeter you like it. 

I think the idea of a love song has changed. Most of the love songs we all loved as kids would be classified as funeral dirges now, you know, really super slow. I think nowadays the ballad has changed. It can have some up-tempo, some drums, some other things. ‘Forever’ would still be considered a ballad, I guess, but the tempo is probably more of a mid-tempo. The content is love song. I don’t know how to write anything else.

Oh, my darling, it’s incredible, that someone so unforgettable should think I am unforgettable, too.

When rock came in, people didn’t know what to do. Even Sinatra, he didn’t know what to do. The music was changing. And it’s changing now.

A musician’s responsibility is to get as much of his art across to the public as possible.

I tried to connect my singing voice to my guitar an’ my guitar to my singing voice. Like the two was talking to one another.

Just to keep it interesting I’ll tune the guitar randomly, so I don’t know what’s going to come out.

I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea.