Play it f**kin’ loud!
Don’t criticize what you can’t understand.
I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.
I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.
Sailing round the world in a dirty gondola oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!
Well, I don’t know, but I’ve been told the streets in heaven are lined with gold. I ask you how things could get much worse if the Russians happen to get up there first; Wowee! pretty scary!
Wagon Train was on. It seemed to be beaming in from some foreign country. I shut that off, too, and went into another room, a windowless one with a painted door – a dark cavern with a floor-to-ceiling library. I switched on the lamps. The place had an overpowering presence of literature and you couldn’t help but lose your passion for dumbness.
Actually, I think the more Ben [Taylor] sings, the less like James he sounds.
I like to know for whom I’m writing – it makes the composition easier to do.
If you have something in your life worth celebrating, you can put it in a blues song.
A great song can pull me out of a slump and lighten my heart.
What I’m doing, I prefer to call that jazz, because it is a beautiful word – I love it.
There is nothing more stuntastic than rapping in front of an orchestra.
Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It’s not an occupation or profession, it’s a compulsion.
Even if people don’t understand the language that you’re singing in, they still know good music when they hear it.
Inspiration grows into full-scale creation through persistence and imagination.
The violin, the saxophone, the trumpet: Each makes a very different sound but the very same notes. That’s pretty heavy, you know ? Imagine how many different races make up the human race. I’m called colored, you’re called white, he’s called something else. We still got an asshole and a mouth. Pardon me.
Perhaps it is a peculiarity of mine that despite the fact that I am a professional performer, it is true that I have always preferred playing without an audience.
You should never be comfortable, man. Being comfortable fouled up a lot of musicians.
No one remembers who wrote the tune, putting pen to paper in some lonely place. They remember who had the hit.
I realized by using the high notes of the chords as a melodic line, and by the right harmonic progression, I could play what I heard inside me. That’s when I was born.
I’ve been married twice. Most women would rather not be married to a traveling blues singer.
