I've grown in tremendous ways with enhancing my music, my ability to perform on stage and travel all around to spread bounce music. I've come so far from being that little black boy growing up in New Orleans to now.
I was very camera shy. People like hot girls, so I put my music to hot girls and it just became a trend. The whole 'enigmatic artist' thing, I just ran with it. No one could find pictures of me.
Monk's music is often defined as enigmatic, eccentric and humorous - as if it had little to do with the pain he may have endured to create his art. But I believe Monk routinely shared his history with his audience, no matter how unpalatable that history was, and it is for that very reason that his music connects with people around the globe.
I enjoy reading about the lives of musicians, and find many similarities in their ideas of preparation and their utter devotion to this great, eternal language: music.
I enjoy doing TV than movies. I do enjoy watching music reality shows but never get approached to participate in reality shows. I also enjoy reading books and take time to finish them.
I love Massenet - 'Manon' had been a wonderful role for me - and the music he wrote for 'Thais' is quite enjoyable and not terribly demanding in a vocal sense.
To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.
I have an obsession with haters: the great mess of the Internet expressing itself. I love to type my name on Twitter and read everything. It's always enlightening to see what they hate about you: I'm not pretty enough to be on stage, or my music doesn't make any sense. It feels good to read that, like I'm heading in the right direction!
It's really been enlightening for me to work with composers because I used to think that everything in the music was exactly what the composer meant. Well, it's what the composer meant in that moment when they wrote it.
The artistic side of our family was very important because one person encourages the other. It was a vey enlightening place to be as a kid because of all the music and dancing, and my dad played banjo; my sisters played piano and sang.
The song 'Take This Job and Shove It' spent 18 weeks on the country charts in 1977. 1970s country music fans had a clearer understanding of the ennui of wage-slavery than modern elites.
If you make music for the human needs you have within yourself, then you do it for all humans who need the same things. You enrich humanity with the profound expression of these feelings.
A short story can be really interesting and enriching and powerful, but a novel just contains so much more information and richness and depth. That's what I strive for in my music. I want to create something that's like a longform statement.
A year before I met Mark Brydon - he was the one I used to make all the music with in Moloko - I was living in Sheffield with a guy who was studying architecture. I used to go to his college and crash the lectures there. I had enrolled to do a fine art course, but then I met Mark, and we signed a record deal instead.
I don't feel guilty about the music I love. If you feel guilty about something you dig, then you should stop feeling guilty about it. One of my favorite albums to this day is the 10th anniversary ensemble cast of 'Les Miserables,' the ultimate cast recording, and it is still something I love listening to top to bottom.
I was never really interested in an operatic post, but I took on the Bastille because it seemed a unique opportunity to build an opera ensemble from scratch, and to deal with all the disciplines that go into opera - the music, the staging and the singing - in an interrelated way.
To me, that's what music entails. It's freedom, it's having the undeniable confidence to express yourself in a way that you know is right.
Had I not become entangled with music, I would have become an author much earlier.
I want as many people as possible to hear my music. I'm happy to entertain people by being a star.
Sometimes I forget that I'm supposed to keep people entertained because I'm just making music for my lifestyle and for my people who live my lifestyle. We forget that there's a world waiting on us.
