When people ask me if I have a hobby, a lot of times my answer is that I like to surf in warm water. I like to ski, if I have the opportunity. But really, I like to go to my studio and write music that I want to write, where there's no pressure to come up with a hit single.
I love what I do: there is no pressure. The music doesn't like pressure.
Stand-up don't get no respect - it's the hardest thing to do in show business. You don't have no band and there's no music.
I'm going to be the first rapper to win the Nobel Peace Prize. I don't know exactly what it would be for, specifically, but I want it to be a change I make in the world with my music.
Ibiza is a popular vacation place for a lot of the players in Spain. If you go in the summer, there are some of the world's most famous movie and music stars, so nobody cares about soccer players.
I thought that I wrote songs and wrote music, and that was sort of what I thought I was best at doing. And because nobody else was ever doing my songs, I felt - you know, I had to go out and do them.
I started to like blues, I guess, when I was about 6 or 7 years old. There was something about it, because nobody else played that kind of music.
A 'scream' is always just that - a noise and not music.
One person's roar is another's whine, just as one person's music is another's unendurable noise.
That was a time when I did love music, I couldn't get enough of what was going on. Maybe it was Nirvana that brought me back. I guess it was a comfort because something that sounded so right - and non-commercial - had become so influential, so immediately.
I was an absolute idiot, wearing polo-necks, reading Kerouac, watching Woody Allen movies, and jazz fitted right into all of that. My interest in that whole world became very genuine, but perhaps started off a bit affected - a mixture of right and wrong reasons. I was always drawn to non-commercial music, perhaps pathologically so.
There is no music that can't be used politically, but the motives behind the creation of that music can be non-political.
Instrumental music is nonverbal and thus radically ambiguous. It doesn't lend itself to what might be called content-oriented analysis, though plenty of intellectuals have tried to analyze it in precisely that way.
In a serious relationship, I will definitely write music about a guy. I'm totally into mix tapes and I'm all about small little things. I'll drop by their door and just leave a gift or come over if they're sick and make them chicken noodle soup and rent a DVD and play board games. I think those little things mean a lot to someone.
I started to write a lot of ballads that were sultry and had a Norah Jones-for-country kind of feel. I wanted to bring elements of old soul music and old country music.
I love going to the cinema, listening to music, yoga and long walks along Holkham beach in Norfolk.
Religion is a huge part of me; I'm a practicing Muslim. I'm pretty much open about it if people were to answer questions. At the end of the day, I'm just a normal girl. I have my own beliefs just like everyone else. I have a strong belief in something, but I also love music.
I'm basically just a normal girl from West London who speaks from her heart and who loves music.
I used to daydream in class about what it'd be like to be a singer. It's what I wanted to be ever since I was little, but I never knew if it'd happen or not. I was just a normal girl who was doing all the things teenagers do, but on the side, I was attending music camps and going to songwriting sessions.
I never really approach collaborations as kind of normal things where they're arranged and they happen because you've arranged them. I've always been like this, I just have friends I hang out with, and while we're hanging out, if music happens then it happens.
