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 think the Beatles is one band that, if I'm working on a song arrangement or if I have some idea for a song, and there's a little bit of a Beatles quality to it, I never avoid that. I always will steer into it.
I felt Michael Jackson was inspired a little bit more from the elegance of a Fred Astaire. Michael loved Sammy Davis, Jr. and James Brown and Judy Garland and Fred Astaire. But he wasn't any of those people. To be inspired is one thing, but he made it all his own.
I've always tried to defend the idea that the blues doesn't have to be sung by a person who comes from Mississippi, as I did.
I don't really listen to contemporary R&B with an ear for hearing my influence. Music is a spirit unto itself, and all of us musicians influence each other all along the chain.
I really love what Chuck Berry did with Christmas music, and also the Rat Pack Christmas stuff, which I listened to all through my childhood.
The world I was born into was one filled with music.
My mom was a folk singer and Celtic harpist. My dad was in a barbershop quartet and my great grandma was an opera singer. As I grew up, I discovered pop music and Top 40 radio, but it was in the '90s, so music was very different then - it was really lyrical.
I've always sung. My dad had a song in his heart and on his lips 24/7. A lot of the time, it was the same song and the same phrase over and over again.
From folk to tribal to Cab Calloway, Cole Porter, Gershwin to the Rolling Stones, whose first record was all covers, to country-western, bebop, blues, and even the referencing in classic hip hop to cliched love ballads of the '80s or whatever - that is kinda gone, and that's just terrifying to me.
My dad loved black singers. So listening to New Orleans music, eventually I wanted to play an instrument.
There's no background of creativity in my family; there are no actors or musicians.
I didn't really have a mentor, but I have always definitely been inspired by the '70s - the Stones, Patti Smith, Anita Pallenberg.
My dad turned me onto Led Zeppelin, the Stones, and the Who, but Madonna and pop music came from my mom.
I've been classically trained in piano since I was little. My father was a pianist, so they started me early.
I can't ignore what I grew up listening to. My parents used to listen to Michael Jackson non-stop. They used to listen to Luther Vandross, Lionel Richie, Stevie Wonder.
I was living and working with adult men who were playing a real art form. And I had been playing blues all my life. As soon as I formed my first band, we played Jimmy Reed stuff. So it wasn't like I was a white kid who was learning the blues from B.B. King records.
Big train from Memphis, now it's gone gone gone, gone gone gone. Like no one before, he let out a roar, and I just had to tag along.
I believe that music is connected by human passions and curiosities rather than by marketing strategies.
Obviously the music I listened to growing up helped create my musical pallet. My parents were into pop, soul, disco, RNB, Latin, jazz and Middle Eastern music.
One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.
Dad had a way of defining himself. He couldn't put his finger on whether it was rock 'n' roll or country.
The music I grew up listening to had a message.
To be honest, I think that I am a bit of a singer, coming from Wales; being Welsh, we are all very proud of our singing heritage.
When I came home my parents were listening to Pakistani Qawwali music, like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, they're listening to music from Mali, like Ali Farka Toure, they're listening to Brazilian songwriters, like Gilberto Gil, to opera, to Neil Young even, things you don't hear as a kid in Caracas. I love all the music they turned me onto.
