Natalie Cole Quotes

I'm in the position where I don't have to make commercial music to feed myself, so I have the luxury of being more experimental, if that's what I choose to do. I guess I've earned the right by being in the business for a while and paying the dues and taking the lumps.

My good films were independent and my bad films were not.

So it helped me to just let go of all my tensions and feelings about that world and say 'OK, this is for my fans in Japan. They'll be nice and get into it and have fun.' And it was the first record I made at my home studio.

I don't want to be owned by a corporation and obliged to make a certain type of album. I want to be free.

Carefully execute every instruction given to you by the director, producer, and studio. But that would be a life not worth living.

I don't want to be held down by genres so much.

Being able to take musical ideas through every iteration is attractive to me. Granted, not everyone's going to want to listen to that, but it should exist.

It was about working with other musicians, but more than that it's about exploring musical areas that you could never do with the band you're in, in my case Judas Priest. You could tackle musical areas and lyrical areas that wouldn't be appropriate for Priest.

It's a very subjective, personal, instinctive approach as musicians of saying, 'We don't want to replace what's around; we just want to widen the possibilities.'

I wouldn't go so far as to make 'You Don't Own Me' a tango or 'It's My Party' a hip-hop thing. Believe me, those things have been suggested to me. But I thought if I could stay true to the song, the arrangements would work. I'm really enjoying singing them.

It's sort of what jazz would be if it stopped being snobby and what rock would be if it stopped being stupid.

Musicians tend to get bored playing the same thing over and over, so I think it's natural to experiment.

If I like dubstep and electronic, why don't I make the violin fit me rather than making myself fit the violin?

I realised that success and pure creativity are not very compatible. The more successful you become, the more you become a product of something that generates money. Instead of being able to move forward freely and do what you really wish, you find yourself stuck and obliged to repeat yourself and your previous success.

I don't want to be stuck to any specific genre.

We don't want to box ourselves within any type of genre, you know? Whatever feels good, if it moves us and we like it, we get on it and make it our own. That's what we do.

Coldplay doesn't have to stay within a certain genre; they just go where they go.

Having been subjected to the pigeonholing of Hollywood myself, I realized that once you become a studio-approved director, your chances of ever making your own film again are zero. You make the films that the studio wants you to make.

I don't like to tell people what format they can get things in, or say, "I'm only going to release this on vinyl and nothing else. You have to come to my world." I don't like to say that to people either. But, I do think there's a loss of romance.

My dream is to do whatever I want without any interference from the record company.

Do not be precious about your music within your own world. Try everything you want to try; just because it exists doesn't mean it's done.

In music industry they always want you to write something like the one that was popular. And that's something you kind of have to just - sometimes you just say yes to people, like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure," and then you just write the one you want to write.

I don't want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money.

The worst thing you can do to anybody trying to be creative is to demand participation in their vision.

It is not the being paid money in advance that jars the sensitive artist: it is the having to work.