Anita Baker

You leave home to seek your fortune and when you get it, you go home and share it with your family.

On my album Here, that’s the first time that I’ve really understood how I could put all the things that were happening in the world and in my life and in our lives as just human beings into one body that was just so powerful and really had a perspective. That was an opening for me and I think that naturally, there is just so much to talk about. I don’t see me getting quiet anytime soon.

I have no one style.

I’m just trying to create context for me to improve my musicianship.

We don’t talk music. We just play.

Vocalists must study music and know everything an instrumentalist needs to know.

Damn it, when I’m bombastic, I have my reasons. I want to be bombastic: take it or leave it.

I loved the feeling that I got singing.

You know at an early age if you have a talent for music.

Women have not been socialized to play drums. It’s not natural for us to hit thing.

I’ve said that playing the blues is like having to be black twice. Stevie Ray Vaughan missed on both counts, but I never noticed.

I guess what people forget sometimes is that when I write songs, I write them sometimes in about 20 minutes.

Any particular style of playing which represents an authentic way of musical feeling is genuine expression.

Music should never be harmless.

Critics don’t buy records. They get ’em free.

It is Jazz’s very nature to change, to develop and adapt to the circumstances of its environment.