As a guitar player, you can gravitate to the blues because you can play it easily. It’s not a style that’s difficult to pick up. It’s purely emotive and dead easy to get a start with.
As far as other instrumentalists, I used to love mellow sax players like Paul Desmond. I love piano.
I feel fortunate that I was able to step away from it when I wasn’t interested.
I love all kinds of music.
I’m not a jazz singer.
The short answer is, yes, I think I have become a better singer.
There is not a lot that keeps me glued to the radio as I used to be.
I’m still trying to re-create a Ray Charles concert that I heard when I was fifteen years old, and all my nerve endings were fried and transformed, and electricity shot through me.
I’m easily distracted by other things in the world around me.
I would say that I’m finding my voice in more ways than one.
I love working with the quartet. I have more freedom and flexibility.
My parents were music lovers and collectors. It was around.
I felt that, in retrospect, there was a time in the late Seventies, after I had a string of hits and successes, as a performer and a recording artist, that I wasn’t saying anything.
A lot of what I have always done is do other singers.
From the time I moved to San Francisco in 1967 to play with the Steve Miller Band, there was a lot of support in the music community for one cause or another, but this one was special because it was put on by people who understood where musicians hearts are.
I listened to classical guitar and Spanish guitar, as well as jazz guitar players, rock and roll and blues. All of it. I did the same thing with my voice.
I really just followed my musical instincts every step of my life.
I think that it can be said of a lot of artists, and myself included, that we made the same record over and over from the beginning.
I think the women – Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, Erykah Badu – are doing new conceptual things and using their voices to create new American music.
Quite frankly, I’ve always listened to the black side of the radio dial. Where I grew up, there was a lot of it and there was a lot of live music around.