I just want to make great music. There's not a genre that I would categorize it as, but I want it to be true and authentic.
We like to categorize things into showy things and deep things, you know, and things that are high music - important music - and shallow music. And I think that's dangerous, because there's often a mix of both.
I don't like being categorized as a rapper. I make music; I don't just rap.
The way popular music is categorized and formatted cuts down on everyone's options. And although people don't talk about it, there are a lot of issues of race determining musical categories of what's rock, R&B, or even folk. It ends up restricting creativity.
I never looked or really believed that music should be categorized into particular genres.
In America, music is more tightly categorized.
A lot of people who have been perceiving my music have been trying to formulate a genre for it, and I think it's just a natural thing; it doesn't need to be categorized. It doesn't need to be sectioned, if you will.
I'm going to make the music I make regardless and it's always going to be driven by rhythm and blues and hopefully it becomes popular. But I don't cater to, like, 'OK, I want to make music that's going to fit in this pop world or go on the charts, etcetera, etcetera.' Hopefully, enough people like it so it becomes popular.
That's all I ever do, just try and do the best I can and cater to the song, cater to the music.
I used to work at a catering hall in Hauppauge. Anybody who works as a server in a catering hall, more power to you, but I wanted to make music.
I'm totally into Taylor Swift. I think she has super-clever lyrics, and I love that she writes her own music. Some of the themes she writes about are stuff I wish was there for me when I was in high school, and I'm so happy she really cares about her female fans. She's not catering to a male audience and is writing music for other girls.
It's crazy. Even doing that one episode of 'Catfish,' I get people recognizing me for it who didn't even know my music.
For me, fiction isn't very cathartic. It can be a broad, long catharsis, but it's a whole different thing - whereas music is physical. Essentially, it goes in through your ear. Fiction is cerebral, necessarily. It can do emotional stuff. But they don't really compare - not for me.
Happy music that is genuinely joyful is probably the hardest music to write. I think miserable stuff is more natural to the human condition and maybe more cathartic.
To record an album is cathartic, or at least it was with 'Belus,' but to make music is more fulfilling than anything else, I think.
Readings are more like weaving a tapestry. Possibly people are getting a cathartic release - but music is physical. Music pummels you. It's got a beat; it's loud. Whereas this is more cerebral.
For me, music was a cathartic way to free me from the nut of Ghost. After working on set for 'Power' for 14 hours, it allowed me to pour my sanity and insanity into the music.
I became a human jukebox, learning all these songs I'd always known, discovering the basics of what I do. The cathartic part was in the essential act of singing. When is it that the voice becomes an elixir? It's during flirting, courtship, sex. Music's all that.
The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
My own introduction to music came quite early. My father didn't have much of an education, but he was keen for me to get some qualifications, and I ended up winning a choral scholarship to a cathedral school.
