There are no hard and fast rules. Sometimes you work for free and get no credit or courtesy. That's why you make sure you do what you love.
Singers- nothing sounds like you. For better or worse-there is only 1 of you. Don't homogenize your sound by making it just like the next.
I like 'Unsung' but I'd rather have a 'Behind the Music' while I'm still breathing.
My job as an artist is to take all my thoughts and feelings and put them on your iPod so that you can digest them. Whatever it is that brings you comfort and joy as a mode of resistance, do it. If it's music, that's what I do, that's my mode of resistance, I refuse for the world to steal my joy. If it's church, go to church, if it's working with kids, work with kids, but do something positive in your community that's going to lift you up.
I don't really have any childhood memories of my dad, unfortunately, .. I was 10 years old when he passed, so my memories are kind of skewed. I don't have many memories of my childhood, period.
For me, the most gratifying part in touring is singing the songs that I know tmy fans love, it's those moments when they put their hands up and their heads down that you know that you have hit a nerve. It's those moments when the people in the audience say "sang". It's those moments that I'd listen to growing up, even on Donny Hathaway live, where the people were speaking to my Dad at the Troubadour and I used to wonder, 'wow, what are they talking about?' There's an electricity that cannot be rivaled when you are creating for people live and in real time.
You can expect a record that I put together for you to make you feel good, a record that I put together to make you think, a record to transport you into whatever mood you want to be in. I hope that people associate my name with the brand, and I hope that people associate that brand with excellence. So, you can expect an excellent record.
I really like and singing, and songwriting and producing. It depends on the song and the mood and who I'm working with, what the song is about and where it came from, any number of things affect the levels of creativity. I try not to do too much delineating with my art. Really, it's art, so for me I don't have a most, I just really enjoy my entire process.
Through the history of my records, from when I started controlling the visual, I always used lower case letters for everything, I can't even explain why that is. The character is actually me, and I think once you see the film for the record, or see the video or really get in to the record, that will all sort of reveal itself to you.
