Top 33 Lizz Wright Quotes

The whole musical institution of the church involves a lot of different styles of communication at the same time. Things like call and response. Sometimes they use the music to pray and work things out. And there’s so much repetition in gospel, it’s like churning butter.

Life is good. It might not go the way we plan it, but that’s fine. We just do what we can.

I think, as singers and performers, we are ambassadors of the human experience. I don’t want to get bored just talking about myself.

What I learned about singing in the church has gone into what I do now.

I’d been trained in choral, gospel, and a little bit of opera.

Gardening is a working meditation for me. It helps me remember process, and it helps me remember patience.

I come from a lineage of ministers.

I come from a family that has grown their own food from well into times of slavery, provided for themselves and people around them. So I found, through conversations about the earth and about the house with my neighbors, a lot of common ground.

So many great singers we know have come from the church.

I never left jazz. The relationship between structure and improvisation – that constant conversation and tension – I’ve always wanted in every genre and song that I perform.

I’m a real Otis Redding fan, and I just think he sounds so good. He sounds like he’s always at the end of a long day, and he just won’t give up. I just love his wearied devotion – that beautiful, beautiful, weathered sound.

I love singing all types of genres.

There’s a beautiful, kind of seductive trap in being autobiographical in our writing of songs: We just get stuck in our own syrup, and it’s so personal that it almost can be embarrassing to the listener.

I call myself a singer-songwriter influenced by the gospel and jazz tradition. Naturally, because of my lifestyle and love for nature, there’s a lot of folk and Americana there because that’s just my life.

I’m kind of a subtle person.

Jazz has provided the framework for all the other stuff that I’ve done.

There’s a lot of pressure that comes from the mainstream stuff, and already people who have been saying – people who don’t know any better – have been saying things to me like, ‘You should really think about neosoul. You’d definitely be more successful in that.’ But that’s not my expression.

As I grow older, I hope I can fully embody my grandmother’s remarkable peace.

No matter what happens, I can go back to the mountains. I have nature and my wonderful friends and neighbors. I get so much by being there.

I’d listen to the radio, especially when my parents were out on house calls to pray for people – you know, shut-ins. Sometimes, if we were incredibly sneaky, we could do it at night when everyone was asleep.

The church is an institution of music and of production and performance, and it has to do with taking people to places inside of themselves and giving them an opportunity to sit deep in their own feelings, and to be together and deeply alone at the same time, and to process things.

Whoever is playing with me, they participate in the arrangement; I learned from Craig Street to really pool the stories and the skill and the voices of everybody around you on the bandstand to build an arrangement in the moment.

The women and the men are teachers and preachers in my family, and a little bit of both those fell on me.

I’ve always been genuinely interested in the spirit world. I’ve seen things I will never talk about because I’d be a fool to. You can’t lay out that world in words.

It’s very hard for me to place myself alongside another artist. Everyone has something unique to express.

I get bored very quickly.

I studied opera for a year at Georgia State University, but I wasn’t interested in that meticulous, technical approach to music. So I left school and went back to jazz.

‘Moffou’ is one of my favorite records.

I’m a preacher’s kid, I’m big-boned, I have giant feet, and I’ve always been able to run fast, and so I had this sense of, ‘I can’t fail. I’m invincible. I’m made of green juice and concrete; nothing’s gonna happen to me.’

We had no television, and I only heard the radio when my parents went out to a Bible study group. They liked a quiet, meditative house.

Everyone I perform and tour with looks out for each other; we ensure we stay healthy.

For me, I just want to sing about life. And since I come from a spiritual background, I turned to jazz, because I feel it’s still sacred, like gospel. It’s serious music, but it allows room to sing about so much other stuff as well.

My mom has a couple great tricks, but my father is consistently a good cook. He’s extremely avid about health and fitness and a bit obsessive. He always talks about garden-fresh food.