Diana Krall

Love songs last because they are about feelings that don’t change.

The greatest thing about music is putting it out there for people to figure out.

What we do as artists is a combination of experience and imagination. How that creeps into your work is not so linear.

I work very hard at being the best musician I can be because I love it.

I’ve sung a lot of emotional songs, but when you’re writing it’s very difficult to decide what to reveal.

You want the listener to find the song on their own, give too much away and it takes away from the imagination.

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 saw a vibraphone for the first time and knew immediately I had found my means of expression.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

I sing like I feel.

Jazz is an art that makes a person completely naked.

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.

Music gave me the energy to revise, revive myself; renew, rebirth myself. It was a palliative, a relief.

She’s Dynamite’ was a 100 years ago, and I recorded that song because the company thought that it was a great song and it was hot. That was the beginning of rock n’ roll, and I guess they thought it would be a BB King version of rock n’ roll.

I have music inside me and I’m very lucky to be able to play music and that’s the way that I try to do it.

You only get better by playing.

External instruments are only extensions of the biological instrument.

People like the idea of the trio and so I did mostly trio.

I’d rather be B.B. King. That’s the way I started. Let the heavy metal guys play heavy metal, let the others play the other… I try to do what I do better, not get away from it.

When you listen to a pianist, each notes should have an identity, each note should have a soul of its own.

Too many jazz pianists limit themselves to a personal style, a trademark, so to speak. They confine themselves to one type of playing. I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea. I have no one style. I play as I feel.