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.

People always ask, “Why jazz?” and I’m like “Why not?” It’s kind of like asking Seurat, “Why so many dots?” I imagine if you asked Bjork, “Why the Tibetan bells?” She’d probably be like “That’s just what I heard.” It’s the same thing. This is just the way I see music.

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’.

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

I have a bit of supernatural take on life. For a moment, I went over to the other side. Since then, I can feel the presence of the departed. I’m very sensitive to it.

The honest truth is that every day was new, every day was a challenge, every day was starting from a fresh place, and as time went on, over the course of about two years, things became better and better. But I don’t think that there was for me anything like, ‘Ah, this is taking too long’, because ‘long’ didn’t exist. So I see it as a blessing. I have to laugh. I mean there’s no other way to look at it.

We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first, rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity.

Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.

We all do ‘do, re, mi’ but you got to find the other notes yourself.

When I write songs that touch on social relevance, all you have to do is pick up a newspaper.

Jazz is an art that makes a person completely naked.

Do it again on the next verse and people think you meant it.

I like chords that are very lush with all the lush parts taken out.

Pop doesn’t really look back. It can’t. What makes pop work is simplicity.

I felt a responsibility to present a viable alternative to the popular electric sound.

I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me-like food or water.

In classical music, only two people are important, the composer and the conductor. Everybody else is a serf. In jazz, a thing of beauty is created collectively with everybody getting to express an idea. And that reflects what democratic society is – or should be.

Jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.

I try to teach by example and not force ideas on a young musician. We’re here to be part of a process of exchange.

If I’m not saying it in four choruses or less, then I’m not saying it.

Blues purists never cared for me. I don’t worry about it. I think if it this way: When I made ‘Three O’ Clock Blues’, they were not there. The people out there made the tune. And blues purists just wrote about it. The people is who I’m trying to satisfy.