Melody Gardot

It’s the same for listeners. If you can’t stand your girlfriend, can’t take it anymore, put on your headphones and escape into another world.

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 think that age is irrelevant. We’re all pretty much spiritual beings – I consider myself to be about eighty-five. I feel like I’m ancient, like two thousand years old.

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

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

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.

I still indulge in a glass of wine or chocolate – treats are mandatory. Without deviating from the day-to-day healthy diet once in a while, it wouldn’t be sustainable for me, and that’s what I wanted: an approach to eating to last my entire life.

I got the mumps. They threw me in a crib so I wouldn’t roll out onto the floor. And there’s a big bay window in my house, and that window stayed perfectly still until that train started to chug. At a certain speed, I could reach up and feel the pane, and that glass pane would vibrate. I said, Doggone, there’s got to be a reason for this. So I go to the kindergarten teacher, and she takes me to the science teacher, and the science teacher takes me to the library and reads it off to me — “This is called resonance.” That was the beginning.

You may feel depressed, but it can’t be so depressing that you can’t move. No, I would say that people create in moments when they are elated about expressing their depression!

In the medical community, you would never deny a diabetic his insulin ever. But for some reasons, when someone needs a serotonin inhibitor, they’re immediately crazy or something. And I don’t know, it’s a very interesting double standard that I often don’t have the ability to talk about but I certainly feel no shame about.

And every person can benefit from talking to somebody. I’m the most anti-medication person, but some people need medicine, and there was a time where I needed some too.

I’ll drink water. Sometimes tomato juice, which I like. Sometimes orange juice, which I like. I’ll drink different things. But the Coke or Pepsi boosts you up a little.

I feel like there’s this glamour… where the woman who has a psychological illness is in fur, laid out on a chaise. Whereas in reality, a woman with mental illness or… is struggling with her psychological wellbeing is often in sweats and in a T-shirt that used to belong to her dad and is covered in food bits.

Not only is it a part of my life, I need to bring awareness to the severity of Lyme disease.

If you said you had homosexual tendencies they sent you to a psychiatrist.

I have a form of Parkinson’s disease, which I don’t like. My legs don’t move when my brain tells them to. It’s very frustrating.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

If today I can practice a sport, and move around 90% of the time without a cane, it’s because of the love and support of my producers, record labels and above all my audience who have always believed in me. Otherwise I wouldn’t have made much more progress than I did in the hospital.

The worst drugs are as bad as anybody’s told you. It’s just a dumb trip, which I can’t condemn people if they get into it, because one gets into it for one’s own personal, social, emotional reasons. It’s something to be avoided if one can help it.

You have good days and bad days, and depression’s something that, y’know, is always with you.

I think it’s important for us to have open conversations about mental health, especially with me being black, because we’ve never had therapists in the black community, we’ve never taken medication. I think it was good that when I had my first complete blackout at age 5, my mom didn’t fully medicate me, because I might not have fully been Ye.