Aretha Franklin

If a song’s about something I’ve experienced or that could’ve happened to me it’s good. But if it’s alien to me, I couldn’t lend anything to it. Because that’s what soul is all about.

I sing to the realists; people who accept it like it is.

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

Falling out of love is like losing weight. It’s a lot easier putting it on than taking it off.

Let’s start with the church. As you know, it’s my background, it’s a natural setting for me and it’s definitely my roots.

I’ve never recorded anything I didn’t like.

No one remembers who wrote the tune, putting pen to paper in some lonely place. They remember who had the hit.

When I got pretty good I went on the road with a group. We starved.

I’m trying to make music a sensual expression, not and academic experiment.

Jimmy (Wakely) told me, ‘I don’t want you to sound so much like Dinah Washington.’ So, I thought, ‘How can I get around this?’ And one of the people I really dug was Patti Page. So I thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to sound like her.’ I actually did with a couple curly-cues thrown in for effect, but, that’s how I started getting away from the predominant Dinah influence, and getting my own style together.

Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.

Talent is cheap, and many talents treat themselves cheaply.

Musicians have the intimacy of bringing two people together and the aesthetic, romantic transference.

If you want to be a good blues singer, people are going to be down on you, so dress like you’re going to the bank to borrow money.

All of the technique doesn’t matter… only if the feeling is right.

Hell, nobody knows where jazz is going to go. There may be a kid right now in Chitlin Switch, Georgia, who is going to come along and upset everybody.

The blues was bleeding the same blood as me. The blues didn’t have to explain the mystery of pain that I felt; it was there in the songs and voices of singers like Lonnie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson, in the cries of their guitars.

There are a million good tunes.

Surrender your whole being to a note and gravity disappears.

I started to like blues, I guess, when I was about 6 or 7 years old. There was something about it, because nobody else played that kind of music.

I learn something new every day.