Steve Miller Quotes

I was living in New York. Sometimes, our gang of musicians would go to Louis Armstrong's home and play records. It was a lesson, like going to school at night. Ella Fitzgerald was an inspiration, too, a unique artist. When you had an opportunity to be with people like them, you cherished it.

I love the idea of having a kid who says, 'Yeah, of course I knew about Billie Holiday and Johnny Cash when I was nine years old.'

I was always drawn to the blues. Alberta Hunter at the Cookery was a life-changing experience. I only wanted to get enriched as a performer as I got older, to have an audience which got older, too, and would come to see me when I'm 80.

We all kind of grew up together with Art Blakey because we all were young and he gave us a chance to write. We had to write something that was good and to sit up with a great guy like Art Blakey and watch him.

I met musician Ken Farmer in Lorne and he lent me all of his Bessie Smith blues LPs. That's when I started to sing.

What I used to play was rhythm guitar before I saw Jack Bruce. I said, That's what I want to do in life. He was definitely the main influence.

My parents were both very musically inclined, they were both songwriters and musicians, so we grew up in the house singing music together, and R&B had a huge strong arm in the foundation of my career.

Musicians like to converse. There's always interesting conversation with musicians - with classical musicians, with jazz musicians, musicians in general.

Being around people like Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight, Dionne Warwick and Roberta Flack, all these greats, I was taught to listen and observe.

My musical development stopped when Frank Sinatra died.

I heard Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, and that was it. I didn't ever want to be anything else. I just started banging away and semi-studied classical music at the Royal Academy of Music but sort of half-heartedly.

So I guess I had, I think they tell me I had, about three years total of piano lessons, off and on.

I actually met Chick Corea in New York, where I was staying with a bass player friend.

I was able to work with the best musicians in Kansas City starting when I was really young.

I've actually been playing music ever since I was a young a kid. I got my first guitar when I was about 7 or 8 years old, so I've always been doing music.

I think I was probably an early teenager when I discovered Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and a bunch of people that are on a long list of artists. They were important to me, especially as an early adolescent.

I've been into music for a long time. I started playing drums when I was 8 and piano when I was 10, then bass and guitar when I was 18.

My mom played 12-string and sang, and my dad could play pretty much any wind instrument and had a great ear for harmony. Soon enough, my sister and I got into music because we were always around it, and people were always listening to it.

I started piano when I was four. My mom taught me. And then I went to Manhattan School of Music during high school, like every Saturday. And then I went to Berklee for college, in Boston.

The first real thing I heard was Three O'Clock Blues by B.B. King. That's where it all began for me.

I'm so jealous of my friends who came from these super musical households where they were learning piano at three years old. My parents didn't really play loads of music around the house. We had the radio, but they weren't teaching me about music.

I think my first musical memory is actually listening to Billie Holiday. I think I must have been, like, 3 or 4 years old.

I want to work very hard on music, put out a lot of nice product - good quality product - and then just help people out, like a Gucci Mane, like a Future... like a Prince, like a Michael Jackson.

Dad had four world records, and they happened to be Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Ali Farka Toure. I tried singing like these people, and it didn't work.

My mother, who is a Carnatic musician, started a school for children when I was around three, and I grew up listening to her teaching students.