When I first started, I was much weaker of a singer because I wasn’t used to singing so much. Now I’ve learned, when I’m singing on stage, not to go over. You can go over and mess yourself up. I used to do it all the time, wouldn’t know how to preserve it for the next show.
A musical film is my idea of heaven. You can pre-record, you don’t have to sing live. Singing live was the bit I hated the most. I never felt like a confident singer.
There is a conception about me that I am a playback singer and I sing for albums or for films only, but my roots are in bhajans. Even when I was in school, I used to win competitions for ghazals and bhajans.
I loved everything about show business, meeting the stars, the whole ambience. I was living every young kid’s dream. I was told a pop singer’s life was three years, but I was still making money seven years later.
I actually did my first tour at the age of 10 with my dad, and it was as a country singer. We toured through Alaska, and he took me to sing at places like county fairs, hoedowns, backyard barbecues, you name it. We were usually passing around the hat for gas money to get to the next gig.
My #1 goal is to become a successful singer and share my gift with the world.
I don’t think I ever really knew the right words to ‘Hava Nagilah,’ which isn’t great for a Jewish singer.
I’ve grown a lot as a singer and a songwriter, but also as a person. I communicate better with my band, and our relationships are stronger and closer.
I’m just about the best singer I know, and it’s time for everybody to say that. I have total facility with my voice. And for some weird reason, critics don’t talk about it.
My mom was an opera singer, and she gave up her career to raise a family. But she also taught my sisters how to sing.
I was never much of a singer. I was terrible. It’s embarrassing: I was trying to sound like everybody else. I went through a big Cure phase, so I was trying to do that kind of dramatic voice.
I didn’t think you could just become a rock and roll singer.
My goal was to become a ‘good singer’ rather than a ‘different singer.’
I don’t run after money or fame. The only thing I have always wished is to be a classical singer.
As a very small child I found recorded noise and the solitary singer beneath the spotlight so dramatic and so brave… walking the plank… willingly… It was sink or swim. The very notion of standing there, alone, I found beautiful.
I’m not a French singer.
When we did a lot of that Motown stuff there were four of us on the front line. When we started the evening we’d start from one end of the band and just go along. The lead singer would change all the time. That’s the first time that I actually managed to put it into a record.
Karen Carpenter was just a singularly amazing singer. There was just not anybody like her.
An award means a lot to me. It brings happiness along with a kind of fear. It brings fear because the award is the responsibility which audiences have put on us. So a singer winning an award should always try to give best of him to the audiences.
I like making sounds and putting it together, I’m not just a singer or a producer.
As a singer, the biggest joy I have are the arrangements.
Frankly, if ‘American Idol’ was the way I’d have to audition as a singer, I’d be standing behind the counter in a 5&10 right now. I couldn’t have done it that way.
My sole focus as far back as I can remember was all about my dream to become a singer.
If you don’t take no chances, then you’re not a performer. Performers always take chances. You go see a singer, they’ll hit the high note. They’ll hit that note, they’re not afraid, they’re gonna exaggerate the fact and make me enjoy it, make me say, ‘Wow, I wish I could do that!’
My grandmother really wanted to see me become a singer, but she passed away before I became one.
I always thought I was a singer, but I really am not.
Really the only thing holding a lot of records together is the personality of the singer, and the will to write all of these different things.
Above all, I am an opera singer. This is how people will remember me.
I joined Tommy Dorsey at the Paramount Theater in New York as a singer. I replaced Frank Sinatra.
I made numerous attempts to find a way to do it all, to be a creative singer, songwriter, producer, and to be the mother, daughter, sister, lover, wife. And the thing about music is, with me, that she’s a harsh mistress. She does not come to me in the midst of stress.
When I was a kid, I would impersonate anything that I would hear. It’s – actually, I attribute that more to why I actually was able to become a musician and a singer.
Ed Kowalczyk is my favorite singer.
I’m a singer and as long as I can sing – which, thank God, is something that I still seem to be able to do – I’d like to carry on making records.
I have not forgotten about my dreams to become a singer. If given the chance, I want to take part in a drama OST making and also try out for musicals.
When I was really little I would sit in the back of my dad’s car when he’d be playing old-school music. He’d turn down the music and turn around and I’d be singing and know all of the words but I didn’t even know how to talk. From then on I’ve always wanted to be a singer.
To become a singer requires work, work, and again, work! It need not be in any special corner of the earth; there is no one spot that will do more for you than other places. It doesn’t matter so much where you are if you have intelligence and a good ear.
I’ve always been a spontaneous singer. And all the stuff that you hear on the end of the songs, what they call the ad libs – that just comes out of my head. That’s not thought out at all. I have the verses and the choruses, and then after that it’s total improvisation.
I have always been a singer, a writer, and a musician, not as a prodigy or as in a trade handed to me by my parents, but because of an inner voice or maybe a command from beyond reality as it is usually defined.
I have never called myself an opera singer. Other people do, but I always call myself a classical singer. I’d love to do opera, but I’m still too young and I don’t want to do it until I’m ready. I realise that when I do that it’s going to be… up for discussion, shall we say, so I want to get it right.
When I first released music, and no one knew what I looked like, I would read comments like: ‘I’ve never heard anything like this before; it’s not in a genre.’ And then my picture came out six months later: now she’s an R&B singer.
I actually started out on the stage as a singer.
I’m gonna be making records anyway, even if I had to sell ’em out of the trunk of my car. I’m that kind of musician and singer.
When my brother and me got into performing in the late ’40s and early ’50s, it was a sensational opportunity to learn from our elders. Every show we played had a dancer, a comic, a juggler, a singer, an acrobat. I came to appreciate virtuosity in all forms of the business.
When I was a vocalist, a lead singer in a rock band, I was a law student at the time. It wasn’t a professional rock band, it was for fun. I was already way out of that by the time Phantom came along. Having to learn to sing, it was such duress, having to really try and get to such a quality.
You can be a singer, and you can be a guitar player, but putting them together is another animal.
When I was in college, being a magician was not the classiest thing to be. It was like being a folk singer before Bob Dylan.
When I finally put my guitar in the case the last time, I want to be remembered just as a singer, not as a country singer or pops singer – just a singer.
I think every singer should be able to jump in for a singer who has been sick, for instance, and learn an opera in two days. I know people who can do it.
I mean, I sing. But I don’t think I’m a good enough singer to do any kind of musical.
On my gravestone, I want ‘Here lies the singer,’ not ‘Here lies the T.V. presenter’.
If you want to be a singer, you’ve got to concentrate on it twenty-four hours a day. You can’t be a well driller, too. You’ve got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don’t ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.
Country artists, I met a lot of them when I was five, six years old. I had an uncle who was a country and western singer and I met Lefty Frizzell when I was five or six years old in those shows that would come through Toronto from Nashville.
The worst frustration for a singer is choosing a career in making music and then not being able to make music because you’re always giving interviews.
I was constantly being pushed toward a European ideal of what it means to be a classical or opera singer, let’s say in the Renata Tebaldi mode. I reject that.
I’m not the guy that thinks I’m a perfect singer.
You can’t do opera when already from the 10th row you can only see little dolls on the stage. In such an enormous space you can’t put much faith in the personal presence of the individual singer, which is reflected in facial expressions, among other things.
Sinatra was the biggest influence on my life, my singing career. And rightly so. I mean he was the best singer ever.
I feel like I’m like a healer in a pop singer’s life.
There are a lot of people who would laugh at the idea of me being a good singer.
