I think I had a knack for music, but I think what I was more sort of talented at more than anything, because I don't think I'm a great singer, I think that I grew up imitating different voices that I heard.
I don't think I'm turning back the clock by doing these old tunes. I love rock and roll and popular music. It's just that the spirits of the singers whose songs I do are living within me. That's why the songs come out in the voices of the original singers. I'm not doing imitations. That's the way they sound inside me.
When I was growing up, I despised Irishness. I felt our music, our television and our books were just poor imitations of what came out of Britain and America. I was all set to abandon it entirely.
I began composing works which were imitative of the music I was being told about. I was also very interested in translating the music into visual terms.
John Fahey, thought during his lifetime to be possibly more than a little crazy, was the author of some thirty albums of gnomically introverted droning guitar instrumentals, which I listened to heavily in my teens and twenties; I even produced an hour or so of banjo music in an imitative John Fahey style.
I'm a huge pop music lover. I do love the immediacy, the organic fever that happens when a pop track is so infectious.
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
Kids do their own thing. We let them be real kids. You get an immediate response - if they don't like the music, they don't do it.
What I am looking for... is an immobile movement, something which would be the equivalent of what is called the eloquence of silence, or what St. John of the Cross, I think it was, described with the term 'mute music'.
The most incredible part of seeing people embrace and recognize my music is experiencing the lives of people when they are powerfully affected, encouraged, and personally impacted.
Everybody who know Rick Ross know that, for one, I love creating music, and one of the biggest impacts we have on the game was the fact that when we came into the game, artists was waiting two to three years to put out albums. I was one of the few that put out an album every year along with two or three mixtapes.
Heartbreak was the impetus to me writing poems and music in the first place.
That was the impetus for me to do music or art, because I knew if I didn't try when I was young, then I would get to be in my 40's and I'd be really unhappy that I hadn't.
Apartheid didn't impinge on music. It impinged on people's freedoms.
In rap music, even though the element of poetry is very strong, so is the element of the drum, the implication of the dance. Without the beat, its commercial value would certainly be more tenuous.
But then I'm one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone, its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music.
I'm one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone, its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music.
I don't even know if I always entirely get what I'm trying to say right away with lyrics. I like a lot of things that are more subtext. I grew up mishearing lyrics my whole life, but somehow there's so much more, too, that's implied in vocal delivery and the music itself and the gestural quality of it.
If people are really excited about their music, and that's their primary motivation, then that comes through in demo tapes. That's the most important ingredient.
I started writing music in a season of my life where people were telling me I wasn't defined by mistakes, and God really loved me and was fighting for me, and there was a journey to be had with that. And I don't know of a more important message.
