Melody Gardot

Music activates the brain at a high level.

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.

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.

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.

Baby I’m a fool who thinks it’s cool to fall in love!

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.

Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.

Every day I look forward to getting with my instruments, trying new things.

Jazz music has always made powerful statements about freedom, creativity and personal identity.

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.

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

I can tell whether a person can play just by the way he stands.

I’ve always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

I’m not a star. I’m just backing up the cats.

I play the way I do cause it allows me to come up w/ the sickest sounds possible. That’s the point now isn’t it?

The true beauty of music is that it connects people.

Don’t be a perfectionist… leave that to the classical musicians.

The reason I write music is that I feel it’s a vehicle or channel which leads to your true self, your essence.

My creed for art in general is that it should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise . . . a part of yourself you never knew existed.

I’ve never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world. I’ve gone through all that.

Art is a subject that is inundated with opinions. In fact, that’s all it is about is opinions.