Maybe in music you're making an auditory environment and maybe you change your environment around you to suit your own way.
The stories in our music form a special viewpoint on the story of America in the 20th Century.
My real musical discovery started when I was 10 with Stevie Wonder and the Jackson 5, and acts that I connected with because they were young when they were doing it, like me. Then I kind of came into my own a couple of years later; I found new artists that shaped my musical landscape. For instance, Kings of Leon played a big part in that.
I have always thought of music as a highway with many lanes.
Somehow, I see music as a garden which has a lot of different styles: contemporary, classic, ethnic, Japanese, rock & roll, and so on. I can enjoy them all, and there is space for them all.
One of the first things I want do when I start writing music for a film is to create its own sound world, its own music world.
The blues is like a planet. It's an enormous topic. You can't ignore the impact that it has had and continues to have on the whole musical culture. It's a tree that everyone is swinging from. Without it, I don't know where I would be. It's indelible and indispensable.
I guess I see 'Goo' half as a really New York record because I think there are a lot of really particular New York references on it, but I also see it, for us, as the first of our records that really opened up to the larger world around us.
I was born and raised in the Bronx, and growing up here, you would go down the block, and on one corner you would hear bachata, on another corner some salsa, and of course there was hip-hop and R&B all over the place. So for me, it is very organic to have these combinations.
There's no musical landscape to poetry. It has somewhat of a higher standard than songs, I think.
I go to a very visual place when I'm singing. It's very cinematic and I get this feeling of space. I love when music does that.
Mostly every form of American music is dead. It's been dead. R&B isn't really good. You got a handful of great guys - Ne-Yo, R. Kelly, Usher. You have a handful of great female artists. But for the most part the music world's changing and change is good. You have to make adjustments if you want to survive in that world. You start to thinking about creative moments - bliss. When everything was all good. You realize that in comparison to the way hip-hop started off, where we should be at right now is not there.
People who take risks like Amy Winehouse and Norah Jones take a second to catch on, but eventually they do because they're different and honest in a musical landscape that's not always like that.
It's funny, now there are so many bands that I can never remember any of their names. Maybe it's because I'm old.
'Passione' is a selection of the music moments that have accompanied my youth; a collection of cherished memories, of moments, of fleeting emotions, of sleepless nights.
I've always felt writing a song was a bit like going on location. That's true in an almost literal sense. Where you are seeps in somehow.
Any of the decisions that I made, if one could actually locate a shape or form, were all within a wall, the landscape of music.
Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details of the house-the color of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and the mortar of the house.
I feel like I can see the music and can see how the character of the music actually flows. For me, that's music to my eyes.
Low' was probably the album that influenced me more than any other, because of how it combined humor and impressive, glamorous, driving energy with this totally surreal soundscape production.
Ah, it's awesome learning about theater, but it's a completely different musical landscape from rock and roll.
When I make music and I'm talking on records, it's like I'm painting a picture. In my mind, I'm seeing a film.
I'm sure the atmosphere at Tanglewood and the space there and nature - I think it absolutely fits Wagner's music.
I'm a melody guy. To me, that's a musical souvenir people take from a movie. They remember a theme or a feeling, and if they've had a good or bad experience it evokes that sensation whenever they hear it again.
Certainly one of the more common experiences in the jazz field is discovering someone new. Improvising musicians are capable of being musical travelers, voyagers. We want to join in on whatever we hear. There is a freedom to wander the musical landscape.
