Melody Gardot

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.

I learned to play guitar on my lying back while I was bed-ridden. I only thought to record the songs because sometimes I would I couldn’t remember what I had just done. Eventually I started singing, because I thought if I sang it that would help to remember even more. But I wasn’t trying to sing. And then one day-this is really weird -I just wrote a song. It came out at a rapid rate and I recorded it and I listened back to it and was like ‘Wow, it’s a tune’.

The first jazz I heard was Duke Ellington. I was learning to play classical music, but my teacher swapped out those lessons for jazz lessons because I had started adding grace notes to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.

When you make a sound, it carries on to infinity. Sound is a vibration. Vibration is energy. All of that survives in space long after we’re dead. When I walk on stage at the Wiener Staatsoper, I can feel the footsteps of Chopin and Rachmaninov.

I had an affinity for music and could play anything I heard on the piano, but I wasn’t scholastically advanced in any way. It was more of a habitual tendency. I would work on weekends at piano bars playing jazz when I was an art student, but the music wasn’t mine – it was covers: everything from Radiohead to really old jazz. But other than that, the only training I had was piano lessons from when I was nine until I was eleven.

For a long time I hated my body, because I was constantly suffering. But now I look at it like an old Mercedes with chrome bumpers. It costs a fortune to repair, it breaks down all the time, you can only use it once a week, the seat leather is starting to crack – but nonetheless it’s mine.

To get rid of an enemy one must love him.

Love is friendship that has caught fire. It is quiet understanding, mutual confidence, sharing and forgiving. It is loyalty thru good times and bad. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weaknesses. Love is content with the present; it hopes for the future and it doesn’t brood over the past. It is the day-in and out chronicles of irritations, problems, compromises, small disappointments, big victories and common goals. If you have love in your life, it can make up for a great many things that you lack. If you don’t have it, no matter what else is there, it isn’t enough.

I’m standing in the ashes of who I used to be.

Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart.

Every heart has its own skeletons.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined to strengthen each other, to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.

And somewhere in my time with you, the crickets emerged as birds and the blackened hills found their hue. My eyes fell on you; I didn’t watch the sun move, but I felt the world turn all night.

My love rumbles like the sternum of a lion. Be mindful of the beast you stir up.

Love – THE FEELING – is a fruit of love, the verb.

Trust. Above all, I ask for trust. You won’t know every thought that crosses my mind, but just know that they’re all for us.

They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill, what never dies. Nor can Spirits ever be divided that love and live in the same Divine Principle; the Root and Record of their Friendship. If Absence be not death, neither is theirs. Death is but Crossing the World, as Friends do the Seas; They live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is Omnipresent. In this Divine Glass, they see Face to Face; and their Converse is Free, as well as Pure. This is the Comfort of Friends, that though they may be said to Die, yet their Friendship and Society are, in the best Sense, ever present, because Immortal.

I’ve always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be.

Never close your lips to those whom you have already opened your heart.

There is no remedy for love than to love more.

I’ve forever wanted a woman who loves like a soldier and fights like a poet. Always with unfailing faithfulness, always for the yearning in her heart.