Early Exposure Quotes

I've been touching instruments since the day I was born. My mother is Brazilian, and she listens to Brazilian music. My father was a musician, and I've seen pictures of him when he was in a band playing guitar and piano. He loved country music, Frank Sinatra, and stuff like that.

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.

Since I was a kid, I was listening to hip-hop.

I was four days old when I went to my first bluegrass festival.

As a very small girl, I listened to Charlie Parker and loved him and Max Roach and people like that.

I loved numbers from a very young age. I feel like my mom led me there because, instead of giving me Game Boy and PlayStations and a TV, she gave me educational software on our family computer for Math and stuff.

It was a very well-rounded childhood with lots of different opportunities. My mom will say she set out to overstimulate me - surround me with way too many things and let me pick. As a result, I've always been a multitasker; I've always liked a lot of variety.

From a small child to right now - I mean, when I was five years old, Red Norville, Tal Farlow, Charles Mingus, Les Paul, Mary Ford, people like that were coming over to my house. So I was around professional adult mature musicians who had had big careers.

As long as I can remember, growing up we had a guitar around our house, and I was always plucking on it.

Drinking and smoking grass were a part of my life as far back as I can remember.

Since I was a kid, music has been a huge part of my life. My parents had a pretty solid vinyl collection and exposed me to some amazing artists.

My father was from the South and turned me into a news junkie at a very early age. I would sit and watch TV with him.

My mother is British; she's from Shrewsbury. She turned me onto 'Monty Python' very early.

Hee Haw was probably my biggest exposure to live music at a young age, because there wasn't any live music around my town and no one in my family played instruments.

Edgar Meyer's violin concerto was the first piece of contemporary music I worked on in any depth. I was 18 or 19.

It was always something I knew I was capable of and from an early age my mother was involved in the film industry. She used to work at a production company. So I was exposed to a renaissance period of films in New Zealand back in the early 80's.

My mother was the first singer I had contact with. She sang constantly to us around the house, in church.

My brother gave me my first records when I was about 3 or 4 years old, because he bought a lot of records. And he was very nice because he gave me the records he thought I'd like more.

I was interested in science before I even knew what science was.

I was about seven or eight years old when I first heard West Side Story, and it had a huge impact on me. If you look at the elements of that record, it contains many of the things I enjoy doing today.

In the 1950s in the United States, few music lovers were listening to chamber music. Daddy played Bach and Haydn on our phonograph for me. Not only did I become familiar with the form; he discussed the concerti. My own head start. My own Head Start.

I remember, my first time in the studio, I was with my dad, Dark Skies. I was, like, 4 years old. It changed my life. I was like, 'I've found my playground.'

I heard about the Holocaust before hearing the 'Cinderella' story or watching 'Peter Pan.'

'Hamlet' was the first movie I saw. In 1948, my mother said, 'I'm going to take you to see 'Hamlet' with Laurence Olivier.' She was worried about taking me to it because she wasn't sure I was old enough to understand it or to maybe be adversely affected by it, but I got recordings of it and memorized all the soliloquies.

I learned early to drink beer, wine and whiskey. And I think I was about 5 when I first chewed tobacco.