Melody Gardot

One of the problems of people who live with pain is that they spend the whole day thinking about it, and it’s exasperating. But even when I am having a bad moment and I can’t get myself together, I get on stage and for an hour or two the pain becomes super-small. It’s about controlling the mind, telling the pain to step aside. Music does that. It’s the most fantastic drug in the world.

Music activates the brain at a high level.

I still do what I love, and I don’t really think about it. I try to make a beautiful show, so people go home happy. That’s my biggest aspiration: to make people happy.

Jazz is a sideways glance at music. It’s like being an architect, knowing the basis of design but understanding that the façade can be whatever you dream. I’m a free person. I don’t want to be tied down.

Why Jazz? This is just the way I see music.

For me an album cover is like a movie poster. I wanted an image that was pure femininity, which could please a sculptor. I went through a lot of suffering. But managing to stand up nude on stage carrying a guitar is a victory.

Virtue has never been as respectable as money.

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

Where charity keeps pace with grain, industry is blessed, but to slave to get, and keep it sordidly, is a sin against Providence, a vice in government and an injury to their neighbours.

The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.

Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists – talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having.

We cannot well do without our sins; they are the highway of our virtue.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

Who then is free? The wise man who can command himself.

Cities give us collision. ‘Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

We have only now, only this single eternal moment opening and unfolding before us, day and night.

Those that are little, little things suit.

Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints.

The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.

What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done his work? What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology.

To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs.