Stevie Wonder

We need to make love great again because black lives do matter, because all lives do matter.

The popular song is America’s greatest ambassador.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

I look for a deep, gutty feelin’ in a guitar tone. I don’t use picks. People ask, “How you get that?” It’s just there. There’s a lot of people try to play real fast chords-da da da da da-that ain’t the hard, solid blues. It’s synthetic. It has not feeling to it. You sit down and play some funky, funky guitar. Take your time! Don’t rush it. Just let it come flowing through you. I can play guitar so funky, it’ll bring teardrops to your eyes.

Musicians have the intimacy of bringing two people together and the aesthetic, romantic transference.

It bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not. It’s feeling.

During these years I began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction with the relations of the music-loving public and the living composer. It seemed to me that we composers were in danger of working in a vacuum.

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

If you’re gonna sing meaningful songs, you have to be committed to living a life that backs that up.

Jazz is a beautiful word. I love it.

When I began listening to saxophones, I was first attracted to Coleman Hawkins.

Jazz is the continual pulsation of the now.

Sometimes I just think that there are more things to be said to make the audience understand what I’m trying to do more. When I’m singing, I don’t want you to just hear the melody. I want you to relive the story, because most of the songs have pretty good storytelling.

True Jazz lovers understand the rhythms are infectious because they are the roots.

If you dig it, do it. If you dig it a lot, do it again.

Playing gives me as much good feeling now as it did when I was a bitty kid.