My greatest accomplishment is the freedom for doing what I want to do with my music...I love my freedom so I'm happy I am a free artist.
Having more candidates come with a creative and artistic sensibility would actually bring more people out to vote.
I'm my own artist, and I see artists as movies. No one should try to change them for anything. If you don't like it, you just don't follow it. And if you don't like a movie you don't watch it. Watch another movie.
Can't a rapper insist, like other artists, on a fictional reality, in which he is somehow still on the corner, despite occupying the penthouse suite?
The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.
I know a lot of people who read and think: "George [Saunders] is so much fun." There's no denying you're fun to read, but as a writer I think of [George Saunders] as, in fact, not a fun and freewheeling type but really an obsessive control artist.
Any artist who aligns themselves with a politician is making a category error because what politicians do is not on a human scale, it is on a geopolitical scale.
Leonard [Nimoy] was such a teacher for me. He was one of the most fully realized human beings I have ever known on every level - in his personal life with his personal relationships and his love for his wife and his evolution with his family. Then as an artist, as an actor, as a writer, as a poet, and as a photographer. He never stopped.
There was a long time where I was an "artist" in quotes, who had no money. But I guess back then I also never had a girlfriend.
You can never not feel like that, as a working artist these days. It's funny - time off makes me nervous, but so does time on. At least the pressure wasn't coming from outside.
I think for us, we don't feel like the future of music is in the act of being a record company. We feel like the future of the music business is in empowering artists to have better and better tools to communicate with their fans. We want to be people who are saying to artists, "Look, you don't need that company over there to release your album. You can do it this way." Almost more of a band partnership than a label-artist relationship. Not about ownership of content, but about empowerment.
I've always been singing. Since day one. I started doing musical theater and you have to sing in musical theater and so that's where I got most of my training. So singing on stage, you just inevitably, when you're around other vocal artists, you get better at singing.
If the photographer is to create works that will stand for his spirit in the same way as artists in other genres, he must first - having no ready-made, abstract components such as works and sounds - supply other means to abstraction instead.
Maybe it's easier to have that desire guest-spot-packed album, for example, you're a rapper and you need someone to sing the hook. I guess for us, it just kind of feels like we want to explore ourselves more. That sounds kind of cheesy, but I don't know. I have a lot of artists whose music I have this perfect relationship with, and I don't really feel like I need to meet them or get to know them or write with them because of it.
We've been fortunate enough to have a lot of people to ask us to be on their records - so many artists and musicians that we really respect and look up to. And it's been really special. But from our side, there's so much that we in the Little Dragon are still learning about ourselves writing-wise that I guess we haven't had that need.
For us, as artists, our goal isn't to forever try to play at the biggest venue ever. Our goal is to make music and keep pushing ourselves creatively, whether it gets attention or not. If we get to do that without being broke? That's our goal. And that may not mean that's going to result in us playing the biggest venue in the world.
It's not always a conscious thing - I've never been that artist to come to the recording session with a concept of an album; I am a lot more intuitive. I usually start with the music and try to catch a feeling, a gut feeling. And then you need to do interviews and explain yourself more, in words. But during the process it's really about the gut feeling, and it's hard to explain. You're trying to find those moods that make you feel something, I guess.
If you're just starting off as an artist, steal as much inspiration from everything you like, as much as you can. Take from books, from poets, from musicians. Just steal stuff from all over the place and then mix it up to make something of your own.
I feel like there are a lot of artists that you could put together that you love, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to make amazing music. Giving an artist a great theme to write about doesn't mean the song's going to be good.
It's always a bit risky, when you put yourself out there with somebody in a collaboration, but I think we learn things every single time, and we come out of it with a new perspective on writing because everyone's process is different. Unfortunately we don't always get to spend time in the studio with those artists - oftentimes it's just sending files online. But both can be liberating and productive in their own way. Some of the best collaborations happen when you're all in a room together.
I just started to understand my craft, what I wanted to do as an artist. It's just a growing process. Figuring out exactly what I wanted to do and obviously I toured a whole bunch. I did a lot of song writing for other people and then just settled back into my zone.
Authors and artists are still afraid of breaking away as far as [William Burroughs] did... And he did it in the 50s!
Luckily, I don't have to be anybody but Yolanda, because people don't expect me to be anything other than who I am. For an artist, it's a great place to be.
Some people don't listen to my music because they say that I am an artist. And some don't want to go to my gallery shows, because they say I am a musician.
I don't think you make a choice to be an artist. There was no decision for me. I've been expressing myself this way since I can remember.
