A Quote by Curtis Mayfield
As a kid, sometimes you have nobody to turn to. I could always go back to some of the sermons and talk to myself in a righteous manner and put that in a song.
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Every song I ever wrote, I wrote to be heard. So, if I was given a choice that 50 years from now I could either have a dollar or knowing that some kid was listening to my song, I'd go with the kid listening to my song.
I have always thought it was important to maintain some connection for myself to what it takes to make a song work by myself, to put a song across to an audience by myself.
It's a real smug self-righteous punk kid saying nobody has the right to tell him what to do and how dare you put a sign up saying that I can't go on your property?
I might sound like a crazy person, but that's the way I pump myself up. You know how some people are just like 'I have to talk about it'? Sometimes I'll call my husband and we'll talk about it, sometimes I have to talk to myself in the mirror. So I start talking to myself: 'You got this. Don't think of this as Sports Illustrated, just think about this as the best swimsuit campaign you've done in your life. And just kill it and own it and don't put that pressure on yourself.'
When you talk about bullying I always go back to when I was at school, a bully was a big kid picking on a little kid.
I suppose I could have sat back and pitied myself. For a time I wondered if I'd ever be able to go on to a stage and perform again. After a couple of weeks I began to feel I could fight my way back to health if I put my mind to it. I thought to myself: 'Pity never did anybody any good. Go on. Patsy, show 'em what you can do'
I talk to myself on paper about my characters - sometimes writing in first person... I keep lists of unanswered questions that I can always turn to in order to get myself going.
Sometimes when you're writing a song, it's work, and you really have to make sure you're kind of pounding out every little piece of it. And then sometimes you write a song, and you turn around and you go, 'How did we do that?'
I live in Virginia alone, and sometimes there's too much time to think. So you turn on the TV, but sometimes that don't do, so you turn the music on, and sometimes that don't do, and so you try and write a song, and sometimes that don't do... So you just take it as it comes.
Sometimes I'll hear some music in my head or I'll go to the piano and mess around and come up with a tune, or be on the guitar and come up with some chords - or I'll come up with lines, or just some words, or just a sentence. It could be the title of a song. I do that all the time. I write titles of songs a lot. And sometimes I'll end up writing a song that I don't have a title for and I'll say, "Oh, this goes with that title".
Sometimes I have to run and hide. What I do at home sometimes is, I listen to a CD of the roughness of the ocean. I turn every light off, and I turn the stereo on, and I just go in my mind, cry, talk to God, tell him, 'I'm your child, too.' And I stay in my little solitude until I can get the strength to go outdoors.
I would love to have some sort of 'Back To The Future' Delorean time machine travel device so I could go back to 1981 to see that very first Jackson 5 concert I went to, back when I was a kid.
I got tired of seeing people rush through the national anthem so they could have their popcorn and get to the game. Nobody ever sang the anthem with soul. It was always done clinically and they always stuck to the original. I put feeling into it. I sang it in a soulful manner.
I was one of those guys, you know, playing and singing, and there was no reason for me to write a song, because there were so many beautiful songs out. And Bob Dylan was always the ultimate songwriter, and nobody could ever write a song as good as him, and nobody ever has written a song as good as him.
I can't go without Vegemite, a salty spread from Australia. I put it on toast, and it brings me back to being a kid. I make sure to put it in my bag because I'm always on the road.
I found myself Tivoing because I was working so much last season [of Heroes], I Tivoed all of the episodes so I could come back and watch them back to back to back and I found myself like I could not put my remote down. I was like, "Just one more episode, please."
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