Dec 25, 2025
I don’t know how [songwriting] works. I have thought about this a lot and I haven’t made any progress. It’s a mystery. Which is great, actually. I like that it’s a mystery. It’s not something I can unravel. It’s like trying to figure out how we got here. It’s involved...
Dec 25, 2025
I think, for me—because I haven’t been in a horrible marriage and I don’t have delinquent children that I’m trying to get through college—I haven’t had a lot of those bad experiences that really twist people’s minds. That’s when you stop writing about love, and you...
Dec 25, 2025
I have found that there’s just meant to be cycles to creativity. There are times when you’re going to be extremely creative and times when you’re not, and I think the times you’re not heeds the next part of the cycle. And that’s definitely happened with me over and...
Dec 25, 2025
I think it’s important to tell our stories – just to add it to the soup – because I think in the end it’s more flavorful than if there were only a few. Especially for people who can’t see their stories on TV or read them in history books and stand up for themselves....
Dec 25, 2025
When I got to Motown, I had an idea—I wanted to get rid of this stigma of “race music.” There were some nasty events that happened to me as a child, racial things. I figured that music could bring people together. It was that one common denominator that could get...
Dec 25, 2025
I think that in music there’s a oneness, there’s a sweetness. Or there can be. What I call music, anyway … the music I like. I go to it for that oneness and that sweetness. If you look at the world, there’s so much separation. There are polarities and wars. But to...
Dec 25, 2025
I don’t think songwriter ever gets easier. It certainly doesn’t get any less interesting. It’s still fascinating and there’s still no easy solution with songwriting. It’s a vast skill or craft or art or whatever it may be. I never think I know how to do it, so I keep...
Dec 25, 2025
When I am writing a song, say, a blues song, it’s not up to me to try to make it a reggae song. Because the songs tell you, “I am a blues song. I am not a reggae song.” Maybe when it’s finished and it’s in its pure form, somebody else could take it and change it and...
Dec 25, 2025
I’d like to believe, whether it’s true or not, that I’m getting better—or at least that I’m not getting worse. Music is so complicated that it’s something you can always get better at. I don’t understand the fact that most singer-songwriters in pop music...
Dec 25, 2025
I never thought I could sing. Doo would come in from working and catch me rocking my babies to sleep. And I would be singing, “I’m dreaming of a White Christmas …” (laughs). That was the only song that I could sing to them that would make them go to sleep. He came in...
Dec 25, 2025
“You’re never quite sure where the song is going, because you might not find the word to rhyme with the end of the line. You have to find associative meaning to get you there. So it’s rather like doing a crossword puzzle backwards. A kind of strange,...
Dec 25, 2025
“There’s a feeling when I’m on to an idea and making something up that’s almost a momentum that carries me and I find pushes me into the next verse. It’s not really a matter of doing an outline. And you know in school we were always taught to do an outline, and I...
