Carol Lloyd

Find the best teachers, listen to the finest playing and try to emulate that. Be true to the music.

If the audience doesn’t hear what is going on, is it going on?

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

I think you can play anything you wanna as long as you take the audience along with you.

Composing is a mindset, a part of who I am.

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

Spontaneously composed music is a counterpoint that has its own rules based on a natural order and intuitive logic.

Despite the fact I’m a professional performer, it’s true that I have always preferred playing without an audience.

Playing the guitar is like telling the truth – you never have to worry about repeating the same [lie] if you told the truth. You don’t have to pretend, or cover up. If someone asks you again, you don’t have to think about it or worry about it because there it is. It’s you.

I’m famous… ain’t that a bitch?

Music is the only language in which you cannot say anything sarcastic.

Jazz is something you have to feel, something you have to live.

Whenever I’m in Kansas City, I think back to all the jazz-blues greats who played the blues here – like Count Basie, Charlie Parker and Jay McShann. I watched those guys jam in different places and heard a lot of things – but I couldn’t do what they did. They were too good.

I think when my brother (Claude who founded vocal sextet Take Six) got his deal and I saw him on the Grammys that was when I said, ‘oh, you know what? If he can do it then maybe I can do too’ and that’s when I really focused on trying to make it in this business.

If you already have a piece of music ingrained in your body, why would you not play it?