I don’t think I’ll ever want to do pop music. I think I’ll only ever want to do classical crossover because it’s something that I love, and pop just doesn’t work for me.
Pop just means popular – it can be any genre, and if it becomes popular, then it’s pop music.
I always loved Sam Cooke, because he seemed very versatile. He sang gospel, soul, blues, pop music.
That’s why gospel will never be pop music – it’s not something that’d be everyone’s cup of tea.
I’m not a great guitarist, but I do bits and bobs. I’m mainly a songwriter and a composer. I’ve done a lot of scoring and some stuff for British pop music that did pretty well, but I’ve mainly been working on my own stuff with Duncan Sheik.
I was always interested in mixing experimentation with pop music, and Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream – we were all doing it at the same time, just very isolated from each other, all in our different cellars, in different worlds, without the Internet – underground in every sense.
I love Monk’s song, ‘Just a Gigolo.’ It’s probably a minor song for him, but whenever I hear a recording of him playing it, I’m mesmerized because Monk clearly loved pop music. He took it very seriously and made an amazing thing out of it.
We just thought that bands from the U.S. in general were just really boring, and they didn’t represent what we felt pop music should be.
My dad turned me onto Led Zeppelin, the Stones, and the Who, but Madonna and pop music came from my mom.
Pop music – deriving from the word ‘popular’ – for me, it’s just great to be a part of music that reaches a large amount of people and not just a small amount of people.
There’s definitely that tribal Africana thing going on in my sound. It’s that marching band, second-line music, that Creole-influence in the kick, and the snare that drives everything for me. I think it’s really what’s separated my sound from a lot of the R&B and pop music out there.
I’m used to presenting programs about pop music, interviewing pop stars, and hosting awards.
Donna Summer was one of the strongest female singers in pop music. She was very underrated as a vocalist and a writer, and her songbook is just outrageous.
I love pop music, but I love pop music that does something a little bit different.
I wasn’t very aware of pop music because I attended an arts school. For me, it was all about jazz.
I love all types of music – jazz, great pop music, world music and folk music – but the music I listen to most is piano music from the 18th, 19th and 20th century. Russian music in particular.
It’s kind of like I’m Phil Spector, and I’m forcing a young girl to make pop music and perform exhaustively. Except, instead of it being someone else, that girl is also me.
I love that sense of change that you’d get in pop music every three minutes, every four minutes.
I think a lot of pop music is escapist.
As a fan of pop music myself, I hate discovering that a favourite track has a completely different meaning from the one I thought.
I mean, come on, Beyonce’s the queen of pop music. She’s the queen. If you could run for queen… I would put her name in the suggestion box. She’s incredible.
The Punjab industry has been very instrumental in bringing the pop music and pop scene back where we see a lot of artists from Punjab cutting singles and doing so tremendously well.
The representation that I always go back to is a pop star – whether it’s Lady Gaga or Madonna, I love the way those women in pop music have always made an effort to create a specific vision.
About 50 percent of the songs on the radio are like, ‘Live like tomorrow doesn’t exist. Like it’s my birthday. Like it’s the last day of my life’… Such a large percentage of pop music is really about party time.
I’ve always liked pop music. I love what it does to my brain, and I’ve shut it out for a long time.
I think that there are all these amazing figures in our history – the Bowies, the Tina Turners, the Chers, the people who are, in many ways, genderless or represent ‘the other’ – and I want pop music, and other queer artists – Kehlani, Perfume Genius – these people are bringing queer narratives into people’s minds.
In the history of pop music, a lot of great records cost an enormous amount of money. There used to be a time where people that had means to experiment would do it, you know?
I had no problem with Ritchie. Ritchie and I never argued. We never had a problem. I think I was always able to write the things that he wanted – until he decided he wanted to be a pop star. And then he started doing pop music. And once he did that, that was the end for me.
I come from a time when pop music was the coin of the cultural realm and in a certain way was the only coin of the realm; movies didn’t matter as much, and not TV – it was all about pop music. In the era when I started – which was the early ’60s – it was all about singles leading to albums.
The Beatles, they brought a whole new dimension to pop music. Of course, the psychedelic period is much more interesting to me, starting with ‘Rubber Soul’ and on to the ‘White Album.’ Great, great records. I was such a Beatles fan. I was very sad when they broke up.
My two most fervent interests are pop music and traditional Judaism. Hell of a pair of fervent interests.
We really like pop music, and it’s not something to look down on or to legitimize. It is what it is.
I feel like my life was meant to happen – I was meant to go on this crazy rollercoaster and now I’m releasing pop music, which is what I’ve always wanted to do.
Pop music for introverts is an idea I wanted to explore.
I’ve always wanted to write pop music. I never wanted to be cool or make a hipster record.
I’ve always been drawn to ambiguity in pop music.
