My mother was a music teacher and my grandfather was a professor of music, and there was a lot of singing in the family. It wasn't like trained singing or anything like that, but it was singing.
I'm singing the way that I love to sing, which is like old soul, like old Al Green. I grew up about an hour from Memphis. So all that music that I grew up with - the Stax music and early rhythm n' blues - I'm doing that. I'm actually getting out from behind my guitar and I'm singing.
I grew up in an extremely musical atmosphere. There was a lot of music and singing around. I never really thought about one not singing, as a person. I've always sung and made music, it was just self-understood.
Writing songs out of my faith was a real natural progression. I grew up singing in my dad's choir and singing with my family. Christian music became the music that I identified myself with and was a way that I expressed my faith. Even at a public school I would take my Christian music in and play it for my friends.
Occasionally I play the music for my mother when she demands to hear it and she always just says, 'Who is that singing? I don't like the singing.' And then she says 'Who's doing all that bumpety-bump noise?' It's all noise backing up horrible singing as far as she's concerned. She's not a show-biz mother.
We grew up listening to music like that: we grew up on the snap music, grew up off the trap music, grew up on all the South sound.
A mediocre music teacher tells. A good music teacher explains. A superior music teacher demonstrates. A great music teacher inspires.
I grew up in the church. My mother was highly religious. I was singing at the age of five for big congregations.
I grew up singing in Kansas. My dad had a band when I was growing up. So I sang in church and school and started singing with his band when I was seven. So I've been singing all my life.
I grew up in a house with a mother who was a teacher and a Freedom Rider - very left-wing Democrats living in a heterogeneous working-class neighborhood. I picked up a lot of those values there, and I brought them with me when I showed up in Hollywood.
Most people don't know I grew up singing country music; that's what I sang right up until I did 'Idol.'
I have always loved creating and entertaining. It started with music, singing. I grew up in a household filled with music - not pop but old-school stuff, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong.
I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music - Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering 'The Lost Chord' on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn.
My singing is not Hindustani classical or too western. It is a balance of Indian and western music. That's the kind of music I grew up on.
I'm from a musical family. My father, Pashupati Bhattacharjee, was a great classical singer. My mother, sister, everybody was in music, and I grew up in music.
I grew up with singers. My father's mother sang opera. My dad was a big band singer. I can't remember a time there wasn't music in the house, so I grew up listening to great songwriters - George Gershwin, Cole Porter - and my grandma was playing opera for me before I was 3.