You can't be unique any way. Music is made from seven notes. You will always come back to something. Even if you think you are unique, you will come back to something that existed before you were doing what you are doing.
You just have to try before thinking that you can't.
We need self-confidence in our ability to build Africa. I trust in Mali and I trust in music.
It's a great experience just to understand that finally being well known is not the most important thing.
There are some things around us that are not actually useful. I didn't know that before. It's very new for me to understand. That became my way of writing: I can see also the new myself.
The interesting thing for me is to put together all my influences and all my experiences I got through my traveling with my father.
Going back and forth between Western Arabic and African countries clearly created the various musical backgrounds I could have and obviously influenced my professional attitude, my way of approaching both music composition and singing, particularly phrasing.
The most important thing is to be happy myself with what I am doing.
I prefer simple things - monotone melodies repeating the same things all the time. Because I think life is like that.
When you are able to make a living with your job as an artist, that means you have an audience and you have to thank this audience.
When you have a chance to be an artist with an audience in your lifetime, you have to say thanks to your audience. That's a great thing. That's the best thing that can happen to an artist.
Sometimes there are painters or very famous artists who start to become artists after they are dead because an audience or a public know about their art after they die.
American audiences don't react in the same way as European ones to African music because, I think, Europeans listen to this music through all the festivals that exist here.
In general, in painting sometimes people like Picasso or somebody are not very well known in the beginning, sometimes they become well known just before they die, or sometimes after they have died. I think these people start to be artists after they've stopped existing.
You can be a star here in Europe and not be known at all in the United States.
I've been in contact with music since I was four or five years old through my father, because of the interest he had in music and all his musical skills. I finally managed to make that my profession.
An artist who doesn't have any audience is not an artist.
Everybody does music from his culture and his experiences with his culture. There are not so many people who are interested by the music coming from different countries and different cultures and trying to make music from that, from all these experiences.
At the beginning of the tour, I arrange the live show exactly like the album, but of course from one audience to another, from one venue to another, it can become longer.
Without an audience, all your dreams will not come true at all, because you need an audience to write new songs and continue to do music.
For me, each time I'm on stage, each time I'm working on a new album, it's like a dream. I can't believe it's happening.
I can introduce new parts because when you are on stage in front of a very happy audience or people who love what you are doing, you are able to do extraordinary things that you yourself didn't think you could do before.
The audiences are really different in general. Even in the same country or in the same city, from one venue to another, the audiences can be totally different.
Of course I am stressed after I finish working on an album about what an audience will think, if it will be successful or not.
I used to play guitar for myself and write lyrics and listen to different styles of music.
