A Quote by Jessica Mauboy

I just want to play music with a band, live. — © Jessica Mauboy
I just want to play music with a band, live.
We just want to be a band and play good music.
When I'm representing my music live I think of it very much in a rock band sense. When I first started doing festivals in the 90s there really weren't other DJs playing the stages I was playing. So I felt I was being afforded an opportunity to kind of make a statement about what DJ music can be live. In the 90s, if you were a DJ you were in the dance tent, and you were playing house music and techno music. There was no such thing as a DJ - a solo DJ - on a stage, after a rock band and before another rock band: that just didn't happen.
My records are not informed by whether the music is going to work live. I just kind of make the music I want to make and worry about how to deconstruct it for a band after.
I do not want and will not take a royalty on any record I record. I think paying a royalty to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible. The band write the songs. The band play the music. It's the band's fans who buy the records. The band is responsible for whether it's a great record or a horrible record. Royalties belong to the band. I would like to be paid like a plumber. I do the job and you pay me what it's worth.
My dad was all about music. He was a musician, leading a band when I was born. His band was active all through the 40s. He'd started it in the late 20s and 30s. According to the scrapbook, his band was doing quite well around the Boston area. During the Depression they were on radio. It was a jazz-oriented band. He was a trumpet player, and he wrote and arranged for the band. He taught me how to play the piano and read music, and taught me what he knew of standard tunes and so forth. It was a fantastic way to come up in music.
It's kind of dumb; everybody should be able to listen to the kind of music they want and just because you're a fan of a band for a longer period of time doesn't mean you have a greater stake of claim to the band or the music.
We've never been a band that gets up on stage and says, 'OK, we're going to play our entire new album.' Of course we want to introduce new music, but we also want to play the songs people want to sing along with.
To me living and music are all the same thing. And I keep finding out more about music as I learn more about myself, my environment, about all kinds of different things in life. I play what I live. Therefore, just as I can't predict what kinds of experiences I'm going to have, I can't predict the directions in which my music will go. I just want to write and play my instrument as I feel.
It's been fun to just play bass in a band and play live but be in the background.
I listen to everything. As I told you, sometimes I just want to shut off from music and be silent. Then I play a song and it's refreshing. It's almost like initializing yourself. Recently I was in South Africa doing a press day for my tour. I listened to this band called "Freshly Ground." They were doing a live gig there so that's the last thing I've heard.
I'm the kind of person who would love to play whenever I felt like, with a band, and it might as well be the Holiday Inn in Nebraska - somewhere where no one knows you, and you're in a band situation just playing music.
I think some of my inspiration came from just being around music. My family was into music. My uncle had his own band and my father use to sing in my uncle's band. If you want to go to the music influences we could be here all day. That's everybody from Michael Jackson all the way up to people in the game now that inspire me.
We play the music we want to play and we play the places we want to play. I'd hate to be on the usual record company where you get an album out and you do a tour, and you do all the Odeon's and all the this that and the others. I couldn't just do that at all.
But if you want to be in a band and write music, then you should just be in a band and write music.
I just remember music always being a part of my life. I was never like, "I'm gonna be a rock star," or "I'm gonna be in a band." It was more "I just play piano, and I'm always going to play piano. That's who I am and that's cool." I think music became so ingrained in me that it was not even my choice.
We, Autolux band, write in very different ways; sometimes we play with the band and write music first and then form vocal parts and lyrics. Or I'll find some music, or a guitar part or something, and I'll just write an entire sketch of an idea from that. So I think things have always been that way, it's just that this time around we had some more obstacles off and on all the time.
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