For me as a solo artist, I never want to be a nostalgia act.
I've learned that you can do something great, but you have to continue reinventing yourself as an artist. So by the time someone else is copying your style, you have something else to offer your audience.
Can you blame them? We have to filter so much information these days. But it does make it difficult for an artist. I'm 46 years old now. I've had a lot of life experience and my voice has changed. People who expect the same old me are bound to be disappointed.
Most filmmakers give me the reference of my own songs; doing the same thing over and over again doesn't push you to do better.
One of the very few things that I actually read about myself on blogs that got to me was people saying, 'Ne-Yo doesn't do R&B music anymore.' Just because I stepped off the porch to explore doesn't mean I don't live in that house anymore.
I never wanted to do the same kind of movies over and over anyway, so my theory on it all is I'm just gonna try and dodge the label and keep doing what I am doing.
It irritated me that my fans kept wanting me to retread old ground.
There's nothing wrong with going out and playing for the fans that have been with you forever. I get it. It looks like a lot of fun. But that's not the thing that drives me. I already did that, and I appreciate everything I got from it, but I want to do something new and fresh.
Theatre can't be done again and again and again and again - it's organic.
Be it in the movies I make or on stage, I think it's a trap to keep doing the same thing over and over again.
Never try to make the same record twice, even when people are screaming for the same sound.
Everybody wants you to do this thing that you've always been doing forever. That's what they want: they want Martin Scorsese to make the same film two hundred times rather than trying to be something different.
One thing I don't understand is how people want you to replicate your past successes. Being an artist should be about freedom and not just becoming one thing, because I think that's terrible and boring.
I can't make hard street music for the rest of my life. Your references change.
I don't want to be that artist who's doing the teenage angst thing and draw it out my whole career.
I could write songs about politics, but I'm conscious of not writing songs that sound the same as the ones I wrote 30 years ago.
I feel like, if you're writing the same songs you were writing when you were 17 in your 30s, something's wrong. As a grown man, you're more confident, and you have less to prove.
I like leaving a space hollowed out, where as I change I can inject new meaning in the shell of the songs all of the time. Where anyone who listens can hopefully inhabit them in their own way.
You continue to evolve with each album that goes by and, as an artist, you continue to expand with every recording project.
I think that it's the job of the artist to be in transition and constantly learn more.
Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.
I think it's our job to write about what we're going through at the moment, and being 41, I'm not going to write about the same things I wrote about at 20. I don't think artists should be farmed out to pasture just because they're in rock n' roll.
To me, the only good reason to be touring is if you still have something good to share instead of just revisiting past glories.
A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.
