Society wants to categorize everything, but to me it's all African-American music.
I just like blending all the genres together but blending them up in a good way. I try to be as free as I can with it.
I was singing totally jazz then, but when I heard the Beatles and heard the gospel influence and everything, I just said, 'I can make jazz with R&B.'
I'm very interested in the distance and the space between those two poles: very concrete, song-based stuff on the one hand and very improvisational, abstract stuff on the other. I don't see any reason music should exclude one or the other, and I think the pairing of them together makes for very interesting music in a lot of ways.
The folk music definition has changed in this fast music world and musical styles are blending really quickly.
Unquestionably, our contemporary world of music is far richer, in a sense, than earlier periods, due to the historical and geographical extensions of culture to which I have referred.
One of my problems is I'm not really sure if I slot into rock or not. I've always tried to combine world music, folk, jazz, blues and rock, and have done since Traffic.
I don't know who I can compare my style to because I listen to everybody from old to new. If I hear stuff that I like, I'll definitely gravitate to it and spin it in my own way. I'm a mixture of a lot of people, honestly, but I'm myself.
When other people look at K-pop with a more traditional Western lens, or when people listen to it, it may sound like a combination of all different genres.
I always wanted to merge heavy metal with pop music, but I think that because I grew up more with pop, the Beatles and the Stones, I tended to affiliate myself with those projects.
I am genuinely into soul, R&B and hip hop - all these genres that get slapped under the 'soul' genre. That spoke to me more than it did to my punk-rock friends. And punk spoke more to me than it did to my soul friends. I basically didn't fit comfortably in either world.
I don't think it's changed that much when you go on the principle if Garth introduced more rock into country music, then Florida Georgia Line's gonna introduce more dance and more beat-driven stuff into country music. That's just how it's gonna go. So whatever influences you as a kid, you're gonna put in your music.
I think that what happens is that all of my modern influences blend together with the older soul influences and you get Mayer Hawthorne.
People say my music is English. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's not me writing English music, but that English music is becoming more like me.
Some people say I make hip-hop. Others see me as doing EDM. Some people might look at me as a trap artist, but I'm not really stuck to any of those.
I'm a mash-up of everyone. My influences would be Michael Jackson, Brandy, Aaliyah - those types of people. So if you can imagine them - and with me taking them, and then putting my own twist and the influence on it - that's musically what I would sound like.
I try to take elements from all kinds of music. Even if I'm listening to anything off the wall, like Britney Spears, there might be a certain way someone did something, that I can feel, in some hip-hop flavor.
My whole life, I've always had one foot in the classical world and one foot in the rock, pop, and folk world.
I would love to be one of those fellows who combine formal and folk music approaches.
I don't have a genre because I play lots of different music that people would say are different genres.
I don't like the idea of 'classical crossover,' even if sometimes I see this category given to what I'm doing.
My brothers came home with country, jazz, everything... it was always very normal to me to make any type of music. It was possible to fuse all the sounds, so it never sounded confusing to me to mix jazz and dubstep.
I've always loved mixing Middle Eastern instruments into a classical orchestra.
I wouldn't categorize myself as R&B or hip-hop. I don't really know how to categorize myself. I'm still working out where I fit with that stuff. I kind of think of myself as pop.
I'm not going to choose between classical, Broadway or pop. I would love to stay where I am now - a mix of everything.
