A Quote by Brian Stokes Mitchell

What I love about piano and vocal is it's incredibly pure, and it gets down to the essence of the song because you're not distracted by an orchestra. When it's just a piano and a voice, it's about the purity of singing the song.
If you write a song, and you go into a restaurant, and there's a guy with a piano singing and he's playing piano, singing your song, or you hear it at a wedding or at an airport... it's fun!
I tend to write on an acoustic guitar or the piano. I have kind of a rule: if I can't sit down and play this and get the song over, I don't take it to the band, because most any good song, you can sit down and deliver it with a piano or a guitar.
I sometimes write songs on the piano, even though I don't actually play the piano. I always hire someone to play for me whenever I decide to sing a song I have written on the piano. My song 'Rosa' is one.
It's one thing having a great song, but I think for me if you take it to the next level... say you had a guitar and a vocal, and the song was amazing but the vocalist wasn't that great and it just was a guitar and vocal acoustic track, switching that to something like an amazing voice singing the exact same song with the instrumentation being really nice and lush or unique in some way and interesting and diverse... I think it's all about the instrumentation and textures in the sound.
As an example, there is a Japanese composer / singer whose name is Tanimura [Shinji]: he has composed a song entitled entitled "Kazeno Komoriuta" and I have recorded my piano adaptation of this song and honestly I couldn't expect that it would be so difficult and challenging for me to perform my piano version of this beautiful song.
As someone who listens almost exclusively to contemporary hip-hop and R&B, I definitely like "No Bullshit" by Chris Brown, and melodically I'm really into what he's doing - that song is kind of singular because it's got this piano intro and outro. But obviously I'm not singing about what he's singing about. What we want out of our songs is not the same thing.
You want to have a feeling when you sing that you just love singing; you love the feeling of singing, and you love this feeling of this voice coming out of your body into this world. It's about really getting that most beautiful, pure, centered tone, thinking about the story of each song and the lyrics, and connecting your own life to that story.
The interesting thing is that, well, here's what I think about songwriters and songs. Sometimes people sit down and say, "I gotta write a song today, I have a title" and all of that, and sometimes inspiration just happens, almost like "Sugar, Sugar" and a couple of the other songs. But basically, I just started playing the piano, and I'm not a great piano player.
On 'Utopia,' I mix sick beats with ethereal elements while trying to keep the focus very much on the songwriting. If you strip any of these songs down to just the vocal and a piano, there's a real song in there.
As a song-writer I have always written with one instrument - either guitar or piano - because I believe that if a song is strong enough to be performed completely stripped down then it is a good one to go on and record.
As a musician or composer, whenever I am recording a song I imagine myself sitting beside my piano and singing the song with a little fear that whether I will be able to perform or not.
I was half asleep lying there writing this lyric in my head at about 3:30 in the morning. I woke Steve up with this idea and then we went into the living room where there was a little upright piano and finished the song. I wonder where that piano is now?
I don't think about, "How does this song that has more of an electronic mix prefix to a song that has a full orchestra next to a song that has other things?" I just work on it as-needed.
Just with the basic one guitar, one piano and one vocal and an audience, I think that the intimacy comes through more. People feel much more connected to the song because there's nothing in the way, and I actually enjoy doing that.
I always feel like I want to write a song when I'm really upset. And when I'm in an argument with my family, I go straight to the piano and just kind of take it out on the piano and get all emotional.
I love anything that gets me outside of my own head. I love music because it's really just - I tried to play piano as a kid. I was awful. It didn't help, and this is absolutely true, that my piano teacher had arthritis. And that's not a good way to learn.
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