Melody Gardot

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There’s no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are.

No matter who you are, no matter where you come from, you are beautiful.

It’s important so you stay in touch with yourself. If you lose touch with yourself, no one’s going to want to talk to you or listen to anything you’re f**king doing. They’ll just point at you and laugh. At you, not with you.

I didn’t talk to anyone about [postpartum depression]. I was very reluctant.. Four of my friends felt the same way I did, and everyone was too embarrassed to talk about it.

The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.

I’m also honored to have the greatest temperament that anybody has.

It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.

Maybe if I don’t cry, I won’t feel anymore.

If one cannot get along without a mirror, even in shaving oneself, how can one reconstruct oneself or one’s life, without seeing oneself in the mirror of literature?

I’m fragile just washed upon the shore.

I think I remind everyone of themselves. Not saying everyone is my size, but it’s relatable because I’m not perfect, and I think a lot of people are portrayed as perfect, unreachable and untouchable.

Huge ego is very often matched by huge insecurity.

Madame, you must be gay; only thus can life be endured. I speak from experience for I have had to endure much, and have only been able to endure it because I have always laughed whenever I had the chance.

You’re not worth the time that this is taking.

Don’t ever call a girl fat. Even if you’re joking.