I got my start in small dive bars in New Orleans.
I was 15 when I started making music properly.
I first started to sing when I started to talk. As soon as I could form words and sounds together, I was singing.
When I started playing music, it was all face-to-face.
I started playing guitar by the time I was 9.
When I was nine, I was passing by a drum class and saw them playing and I was moved. That's why I started making music.
I started writing and recording, at a very basic level, just in my own bedroom.
I probably started trying to make beats at around 12.
When I was a kid, my friends and I formed a band, Trombone Shorty's Brass Band. When I was six, I was a bandleader for my brother's band.
Technology was something I avoided when I started out - I didn't even have electric guitars. Only played acoustic.
We started playing music because of the Wu-Tang Clan.
I started making beats when I was nine in my bedroom and garage.
The first big stars, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, you know, these were gigantic stars. I even wonder sometimes whether all music actually comes from women, whether the first glimmering of music is a mother soothing a baby.
In September 1968, Rush played for around 20 people at a small hall in a church basement. We played songs like 'Spoonful,' 'Fire' and 'Born Under a Bad Sign,' and got paid $10. Then we went to a nearby deli and ordered Cokes and French fries and started planning our future.
I think one of the ways that these young singers got started is that they would end up in clubs. And a lot of them were mafia owned. And so there was almost an unspoken kind of mafia sponsorship, which is just a very interesting part of that area's music history.
I'd been bumming around in bands since my school days.
I started playing and writing songs when I was eight.
I grew up in the 1950s at the beginning of rock n' roll, and would strum a tennis racket in front of the mirror.
I never had any plans to become a producer when I was a kid. I wanted to be a DJ, like most other kids at the time. Then my mum bought me a Casio keyboard and I started to sample sounds that I liked.
I was a kid living in New Jersey, who - I'd wanted to make movies since I was a little kid, so that came before music for me. But I started playing drums just as a hobby, and I wasn't even really into jazz that much.
I did have my beginnings in doo-wop music; I had a group called the Tokens in Brooklyn. They went on, of course, to do 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' and a lot of other great things. I went on as a soloist. But I still love doo-wop music.
My dad gave $3 and a chicken for the first guitar I had.
I became this dorky 15-year-old, in my bedroom all the time with crossed eyes, staring at my computer. It was all drum loops, R&B and pop - silly songs that I hope to God no one ever hears. But that's what got me in to music.
I started performing opera when I was 10 years old. I didn't perform as Zola Jesus until I was probably 18.
You might say it was my return to the living that launched me as a singer. I was placed in an oxygen tent, and the doctors brought me back to life.
