I called the album 'The Chemo' because it seems like the industry and music overall is dying slowly.
Rock'n'roll has to be destroyed and rebuilt in my name if it's ever gonna accomplish anything.
People forget how dominant Public Enemy became in the mid '80s. No one talks about how transformative they were. And then that led to the '90s and the sort of East Coast v. West Coast stuff, which is kinda when I came of age.
My family was a Christian family. But I had to get to Kansas to play the blues.
We're not trying to change the world; just music.
I played Woodstock in '69, and it really changed my life. Without a doubt, it was the single event that really changed the way I felt about music. Up to that point, I hadn't really thought of myself as more serious musician, and I didn't really have that much interest in pop music.
Music is always gonna change; it's just a matter of keeping up with the times.
'Fade To Black' - just this amazing construct: a song that defied the definition of what Metallica was perceived to be at the time.
I'm glad about what's happening to the music business. This last crop of people we had in the 90s, who are going away now, they didn't like music. They didn't trust musicians. They wanted something else from it.
Old music is the same as new music - it's just a different way of delivering it.
I grew up loving classic rock music - The Beatles, The Rolling Stones - and then one day I heard 'Baby One More Time' on the radio and I thought 'What is this?' I was eight and it changed my life.
The music is going to die if you don't tap into something that people today can relate to.
To me, Wu-Tang is beyond Wu-Tang Clan... It's just like, hip-hop is beyond Grandmaster Flash, but Grandmaster Flash was one of the first guys to hit those turntables like that. The same thing with Wu-Tang. You'll see the difference in hip-hop from the moment we came in to before we came in. We changed it. We changed the whole structure.
I started rocking and rolling when Guns N' Roses came out. It wasn't until Garth Brooks came around that I really got back to country. He made it fun again. To me, in country music, the rigor mortis was setting in and it just wasn't fun anymore. Garth brought everyone back over to country and made it cool again.
As Erykah Badu, it has nothing to do with me, the way I look, my hair wrap, my style, it's about you and what you feel for my music. If I can make you feel like the way that people who influenced me made me feel, that's completion.
I was sort of in denial about doing country for awhile but I sort of grew up and realized who I was, what I wanted to say. I think country music is the best music in the world and I'm glad to be doing a country album. I hope people will love it as much as I loved making it.
I think Green Day's 'American Idiot' is probably the best comeback or mid-career record that any band has done.
My favourite 'stage' of Shakira was the brunette punk rock one, but she'll always have a special place in my heart, whatever she's doing.
The first thing you realise very quickly when you decide to do an acoustic version of an electric song is your solo either becomes either very truncated, very different, or non-existent, because even if you play a clean solo, it's different with the Kryptonite... with the acoustic.
I prefer playing with a band. It's good to do both, but for me it's quite exciting when I hear my songs completely transformed with the band behind me. You can really get into it more, and so can the audience.
I treat every album as a new beginning, so I'm asking myself, 'What is pop music now? What are people consuming?' and I take these things into effect.
Rap will never be the same as before
I think music has gone through a period of something very severe, rather radical, rather the way painting did with cubism.
Today's folk song is rock and roll. Although it happened to emanate from America, that's not really important in the end because we wrote our own music and that changed everything.
I'm not in that state of mind that I was back in '86 - hip-hop is not in that state of mind that it was back in '86. Times change. I change.
