I want to sing like Aretha Franklin. Before her I wanted the technical ability of Ella Fitzgerald.
You write in songs what you’re too scared to write in real life, and then you sing the songs to loads of people instead of telling it to the person you should be telling it to… Songs are a great way of dealing with those issues but kind of a coward’s way as well.
All of my puppets have their own personalities, their own background, and they enjoy what they do. How they say things, sing things, how they talk. I kind of created them out of my own personality. They are all me.
Live well. Sing out, sing loud, and sing often. And God bless the child that’s got a song.
If I can’t get a mental image from the song, I won’t sing it.
I’ve written many extra verses to songs that I learned to sing – an extra verse about a friend, or just add some verse – and that led to writing my own songs.
The minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille.
I sing like a lark.
All I want to do is sing on other people’s records.
If you sing honestly and sincerely to kids, they will respond with all their hearts.
So don’t think in reality I am a singer, I think I am a human being that has sung always all her life, and has learned a little to sing, and has found herself in the middle of a career.
I was asked to sing with Mavis Staples on a gospel compilation called ‘Oh Happy Day.’ And, you know, other than being totally intimidated at the prospect of singing with Mavis, I was honored. I don’t really have much of a background in gospel music.
All those people who go to NASCAR and sing country & western songs and live in Tennessee, they totally ignore me, they don’t come to my shows, I just don’t exist for them and they don’t exist for me.
Even though there’s no forum for me on the radio for the kind of music I sing anymore, I am still excited about having a career where I can sing the best music in the world, and people will come and hear me because of the hit records I’ve had in the past.
The true treasure lies within. It is the underlying theme of the songs we sing, the shows we watch and the books we read. It is woven into the Psalms of the Bible, the ballads of the Beatles and practically every Bollywood film ever made. What is that treasure? Love. Love is the nature of the Divine.
I have learned to smile when I wasn’t happy, to sing when I didn’t feel like it, and to do things just to please my fans.
I don’t really sing… I just hear notes so I know what it’s supposed to sound like, if that makes sense. You ever hear someone try to teach a choir how to sing, but they can’t sing? That’s me.
The thing is, my life is a country song. I don’t need to be manufactured, and I don’t need anyone to tell me what to say or what to sing.
I still sing every day – in the shower or on the set all day. I’m sure everyone will tell you that I never shut up. But it’s not in the capacity that I would like to.
First of all, I love singing. I mean, I get out of bed and I sing. I can’t help it.
I just wanted to be a performer. I was ambitious. I couldn’t sing and I couldn’t act. I could dance a little. So what was there left for me to do? Television presenter. That was it.
I can’t say, ‘Damn, I want to sing like Beyonce.’ All I can do is sing like Fivio Foreign and pray to God that’s good enough.
I remember him watching me through the crack of a door singing with a hairbrush. I was in front of his mirror. I think he wanted me to sing. He would get me on the table and make me sing sometimes or play the piano. He was very encouraging on that front.
It’s a song that we sing after we win a Test match. We sing it after every one-day series win. It’s been passed down through the generations. It’s the culture of the Australian team.
And it was then that I realized wow, I’m able to write lyrics and sing and stuff like that.
Psychodrama’ is a form of therapy and it is just expressing how you feel in whatever way is the most creative to you. Some people act it out, some people sing it out, people find their own different ways.
I play Rock Band, which is Guitar Hero times ten. You can play with four people, so when you have parties, you have a real band. Nobody ever wants to sing, so I’m always the one throwing down on the mic.
From a young age, I was encouraged to sing, dance and learn folk and popular songs in Spanish.
I always sang standards because the songs I wrote for myself weren’t as easy to sing.
The reason that you dance and sing is to make the audience feel like they’re dancing and singing. As long as you’re having fun with it and giving it 100 percent, they’re gonna feel that.
I wish I could sing. I love singers, but I am way too shy. Scares the hell out of me.
Honestly, I would love to sing too but I don’t have the courage to sing on a professional level.
Why is it that the hot chicks never can sing?
I want to sing for the broadest possible audience.
Music was around in my family in two ways. My mother would occasionally sing to me, but I was mostly stimulated by the classical music my father had left behind. I had an ear for music, I suppose, so that’s what began my interest in music.
There were no artists in Ossining, which was the home of Sing Sing prison. Most of the parents of the guys I knew were guards there.
You got to have smelt a lot of mule manure before you can sing like a hillbilly.
In 2003, I wrote a New York Times best-seller called ‘Shut Up & Sing,’ in which I criticized celebrities like the Dixie Chicks & Barbra Streisand who were trashing then-President George W. Bush. I have used a variation of that title for more than 15 years to respond to performers who sound off on politics.
It’s through sheer will that I can sing.
I’m not just a voice who wants to sing on anything. I co-produce, I want to select who comes in and plays on what songs, who to duet with and all of it.
I close my eyes when I sing so I can feel the song better.
On that show, I did country and some rock, too, whatever record I had out at the time, I’d sing that.
My favorite songs to sing have always been songs about regret. I don’t know why that is, but to me, that’s country music.
Sing the song or keep it inside.
I have sung for Americans of every political persuasion, and I am proud that I never refuse to sing to an audience, no matter what religion or color of their skin, or situation in life.
I always wanted to know, and I always used to daydream, about what it would be like to stand on a really big stage and sing songs for a lot of people, songs that I had written… Daydreaming was kind of my No. 1 thing when I was little, because I didn’t have much of a social life going on.
Musical auditions are always the worst because you have to sing and act, and that’s so stressful.
Something about Mariah Carey’s songs really had me wanting to sing high like her.
In earlier times, so many people sang much more. You know as a kid you’d go to some kind of religious training and or summer camp or whatever it was and you’d learn to sing a lot of songs.
I had different bands. I played with the Acoustic Warriors for the most part, without girl singers. It was the same kind of sound, acoustic guitar, bass, with violin and sometimes accordion, and the guys would sing, that kind of thing.
I never wanted to sing. I just wanted to play rhythm guitar – hide in the back and just play.
When Paul and I were first friends, starting in the sixth grade and seventh grade, we would sing a little together and we would make up radio shows and become disc jockeys on our home wire recorder. And then came rock and roll.
Traditionally, songwriters can’t sing. And that holds true in my case, also.
To draw you must close your eyes and sing.
If you heard me sing, you would just plug your ears and run, screaming, the other way. I promise.
Songs I do have to strike an emotional chord the first time I sing them.
I love to sing and I do think that my strength as a singer is… I think I have a voice that is certainly sufficient under most any circumstances… but I think my strength is that I really am an actor and I really do have to own what I am saying.
I got a couple on per album but my problem was that I wanted to sing the songs and not let Roger sing them.
It doesn’t matter if you have a desperate heart when you have to sing about joy; it doesn’t matter if you’re scared to death when the lights go on.
We can even sing off key, but if it’s produced properly it can be a hit.
The pop-star thing bores me because it’s somebody programming someone else. Stand over here, sing that, no, sing it like this, talk like that, when they ask you this, don’t say that, say this, hold that, drive this, stay here, live there – you’re not even a human being. You’re a puppet.
I went from somebody who didn’t sing to somebody who didn’t speak.
For me a poem has to sing out of itself and the lilt of it carries the magic.
I’ve always wanted to sing, just as I’ve always known that one day I would have my own niche in the annals of song. It was a feeling I had.
I am not greedy, so I would gladly give a song to someone else to sing if it makes more sense.
Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‘Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.’ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.
