 Black music has increased my enjoyment of what I do. It has increased my range, my ability to reach into myself and accept myself. |
| It's an important thing to remember where you came from. |
| You're presuming too much by using the word legacy - presuming that someone is going to care. |
| I was blown away by the control and the range that I was hearing. I'm listening to Pavarotti and thinking, What the hell have I been doing with my voice all these years? |
| It's a combination of melody and lyrics, not one without the other. It's a confluence of these different elements that makes something powerful. |
| One song will launch you, but you don't want to be a one-song artist. |
| A lot of my success comes from black music. It's something I'm very proud of. |
| When I was invited to sing with Pavarotti, I had about two weeks to learn Italian. |
| The bigger you are, the harder they come down on you. |
| Someone told me there was a publisher that could find a good home for my songs, but I didn't want to give up my pursuit of a career in the business as an artist. |
| When you have great songs that are going to live longer than the composers, everything you can do to bring those different elements and nuances out, serve the song. |
| I have friends who've tried to break into the UK, who went back with their tails between their legs. Fortunately I've had the opposite experience. |
| There are certain people who have become better artists, but they're brilliant at marketing. I think someone who's been phenomenal like that is Madonna. |
| No matter how great we get with digital formats of instrumentation, nothing really quite duplicates the real thing. |
| Considering the amount of information we're bombarded by, it's amazing if a song can transcend time. |
| You can't make everybody love what you do, but you can know how great you feel doing it. |
| The Top 40 is geared toward 20 and under, not 20 and up. That's the audience I'm geared to. |
| I kept looking to do songs that were written years ago and would live or outlive all of us, and the one thing they had in common was Sinatra. |
| A lot of the greatest compositions were made famous by Sinatra. |
| To sing along with Stevie Wonder, you had to make your voice do things it was not accustomed to doing. |
