I never use that word, retire.
If you can’t get your songs to people one way, you have to find another.
My mother was a very beautiful lady, I thought. She was very good to me. I guess – she died when I was nine and a half, but if she had lived, I probably wouldn’t be trying to play guitar. She wanted me to be known, but as something else. Not a guitar player.
I’ve known people that was a part of a family and always feel that the family liked everyone else but them. That hurts, and that’s as deep a hurt as you can possibly get. I’ve known people that would have problems with their love life. This is kind of how blues began – out of feeling misused, mistreated. Feeling like they had nobody to turn to. Blues don’t necessarily have to be sung by a person that came from Mississippi as I did, because there are people having problems all over the world.
I used to play – when I first started trying to be professional, I disk jockey from 1949 to 1955 in Memphis, Tennessee, and I was quite popular there as a disk jockey.
I remember Elvis as a young man hanging around the Sun Studios. Even then, I knew this kid had a tremendous talent. He was a dynamic young boy. His phraseology, his way of looking at a song, was as unique as Sinatra’s. I was a tremendous fan, and had Elvis lived, there would have been no end to his inventiveness.
When you don’t have much money, you worry that they’ll just put you in the ground someplace and your loved ones won’t know where you are.
I think it’s the way I talk. I think they thought I was too country. And I’m not ashamed of that by any means.
Everybody was recording Laura Nyro’s songs and all of a sudden she was a very successful song-writer. And beginning to become hot. She had three songs in the top ten at one time
After college, I knew I wanted to work in comedy, so the first thing I did was go to where the comedy was. I moved from Charlottesville to Chicago, because that’s where The Second City and Improv Olympics are. You have to go wherever you need to go to study what interests you.
I think we’re a band with a lot of history now so it’s nice to come up with something that doesn’t have any history at all.
I always dream about other musicians. And they’re never interested in hanging out with us. It’s like being at school and the bigger boys don’t want to play with you!
Frank Sinatra and Stan Getz had been friends of mine, and I wanted to pay tribute to them.
I’m not a mean person, but I have a capacity for it. I have the biting comment formed somewhere in the back of my head – like it’s in captivity. Sometimes people expect that I’m going to be tough. It’s not a bad situation. People treat you better. People are on time.
Music is for every single person that walks the planet.
I feel like dress socks differentiate you in a different way – especially men in suits who just have the traditional business suit. The dress sock is the way to change it up in your mind and I like wearing my pants up higher so you see them.
At this time when I turn 50, because so there’s many of my friends and family who didn’t get to see 50-years-old, and so, I’m celebrating for them too.
I’m really an outdoorsy girl. People think I can’t go anywhere without getting all primped up, but I love to go camping, and I’m totally fine with not doing my hair or makeup, not taking a shower and just hiking.
Wafah Dufour bin Laden, niece of Osama bin Laden has signed a contract to star in a reality show…called Skating with the Nieces of Terrorists.
I think mystery is kind of great. I don’t know anything about Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn or Ava Gardner – not really – and I like that. I love watching their movies because they’re my personal movie stars. I don’t know what they eat and who their trainer is.
On the TV show that I just did, I worked with a female director called Ryan Case who is amazing. [But] it suddenly occurred to me on my second day of filming with her that I’ve been doing this since I was nine so that’s like 19 years now and she’s the first female director I’ve worked with on screen. And that is crazy. When I actually step back, that is an insane thing.
When I was flying to Rome, we flew over London; I felt like bursting into tears. It’s part of me, so I can’t leave London behind for good.
