"Solange is very, very chill. She's just so real, so human. Karen O, who I toured with last fall, is this badass persona on stage—and she is a badass—but in...
"I spread the message of hope and of unity. That's what gets me up in the morning. I can tell you what is wrong, but I can't tell you how to fix it. I'm a rapti...
"And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there. Squares after squares of flame, set up and...
"God has wrought many things out of oppression. He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create—and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of ...
"While everyone's experience of oppression is different and complicated and often overlapping, I really believe that if you have privilege, you need to learn as...
"Over all, I think the main thing a musician would like to do is give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things that he knows of and senses in the ...
“And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispe...
“The notion that you can somehow defeat violence by submitting to it is simply a flight from fact. As I have said, it is only possible to people who have mone...
"We live in an age of music for people who don't like music. The record industry discovered some time ago that there aren't that many people who actually like m...
"Record companies like to make money, and that is their only goal. They do not care about the content that they sell - they care about maximizing their profits....
“Not even a cat was out. The rain surged down with a steady drone. It meant to harm New York and everyone there. The gutters could not contain it. Long ago th...
"The very first Walnut Whales recording was recorded just a few weeks after I had started singing, out of the blue, started singing. And the voice, you can hear...
"No one likes to work for free. To copy an artist's work and download it free is stealing. It's hard work writing and recording music, and it's morally wrong to...
"An album is a whole universe, and the recording studio is a three-dimensional kind of art space that I can fill with sound. Just as the album art and videos ar...
"Recording a scene with paint rather than film sinks you more deeply into your surroundings. You have to look a little harder and a little longer. And you end u...
"In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music scho...
"Art is basically communication, and I think everyone who's a music lover has had that experience where a record or a recording has kept you company when no one...
“Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is ...
“The ghosts of Manhattan are not the spirits of the propertied classes; these are entombed in their names, their works, their constructions. New York's ghosts...
"Yesterday I was thinking about the whole idea of genius and creative people, and the notion that if you create some magical art, somehow that exempts you from ...
