A Quote by Kaytranada
The DJ thing is just a way for me to perform my songs in public. It put me on the map, and a lot of people discovered me because of my DJing and later found out that I made beats.
Related Quotes
It's always shocking to people, because sometimes when I go on the road and I DJ, they think I'm just gonna perform, so to see me really DJing and playing their favorite song and really rockin', it's a shock to people, and definitely to DJs.
I went out of my way to make 'Immortal' sound perfect. 'Immortal,' 'Just What I Am,' and 'King Wizard,' those are perfect beats. Not a lot of people can perform on them. I say that meaning they're tailor-made for me.
My writing was very much like my diary, and I just put it out there to put it out there because I didn't really know what I was doing. The fact that people related to the songs made me feel less alone in a lot of situations.
I was compelled to perform. When I say perform, I was compelled to go out and do my engagements and not let people down and support them and love them. In a way, by being out in public, they supported me although they weren't aware of just how much healing they were giving me. It carried me through.
I made my name and reputation DJing in hip-hop clubs in New York. 'Celebrity DJ' is a term that I hated. To me a celebrity DJ is someone that's on 'Big Brother' or in some kind of B-movie who gets a gig to DJ even though they're not talented enough to do it.
I opened up my mind as far as playing music. I was at a Cody Chesnutt concert a few years ago, and a friend introduced me to him. We just started talking about music, and he asked me what I did. I said, "I have these songs and I'm kind of nervous to put them out, because I've just kind of been playing blues stuff, and playing other people's songs." He said, "You should just put them out there, man. Why not? It's just gonna bother you if you don't. The easiest thing to do is to just let it go." So I just took that with me.
It's a weird thing to be nineteen and be in the public eye. It was a crazy thing, it was a big deal to me, and it changed me in a lot of ways. And now that it's five, six years later, I wanted to look back at that, the start of it all, the excitement and the naïveté about it, and it just fascinated me to reflect on all that.
To me, it's pretty much the same thing - I just love playing music. But the cool thing about DJing is that I get to play other people's music, I can mix it up between our songs and a variety of musical genres. It also enables me to be more intimate with the audience.
Whenever I go out, so many people who respect me ask me what to do in a certain situation. A lot of times, I didn't know the answers because sometimes I was going through the same sort of thing. But then later on, I would think of things that people told me.
Jail just made me wiser. It made me smarter. It made me wake up to a lot of stuff. And also it made me a better businessman. I had to learn the music business. It just made me a better person as far as the way I live.
For me, music is sort of my passion, more so than being an actor. I just never tried to make a career as a musician. It was just something that I did on my own time, just for me. I had written a lot of songs, but I don't really record a lot of music because, for me, it's the same way as a poet: I write to get things out. It's sort of cathartic.
Music saved my life. I mean, music is life. It is everything to me. It's why I can meet people - I was so shy as a kid, and when I started to write songs and perform them with my sister in front of the public, people started to talk to me, and that made me feel really good. Everything about it has always been positive.
I recorded a lot of songs that I knew I didn't like just because maybe part of me wanted to be nice, maybe part of me just wanted to be in the studio, but I've been learning that it's really important to do what you want to do. Even though I might not write all of it, I am still picking out the songs that I want to do. A lot of people who are writing for me are people I have worked with for a while so they know who I am and what I want. I have a lot of opinions and I have learned that it is absolutely okay to express them and to say, "No, I don't want this."
As a teenager, I put a lot of pressure on myself, and a lot of that, for me, was about finding a moral high ground. As I've grown up, I've decided to abandon that because it made me judgmental and also stressed me out.
I do notice that my songs fit all over the map, even in terms of the colloquialisms in them. The songs come out with their references intact, almost unheeded by me. It's like they existed somehow before they met me with their relationship to the tradition, and then they just end up coming through me at that moment because of my relationship to some certain kind of music that I've listened to in my life. I know that sounds a little bit woooey.
What's crazy to me is that people now assume I'm behind [hip-hop] tracks that other people are putting out. They're just sitting on the edge of their chair waiting for me to put out [rap beats]. But it's not going to happen. I've graduated from that.
Related Authors
Ani DiFranco Quotes
American
Musician
Bob Dylan Quotes
American
Musician
Brian Eno Quotes
British
Musician
Bruce Springsteen Quotes
American
Musician
David Bowie Quotes
English
Musician
Drake Quotes
Canadian
Musician
Elton John Quotes
English
Musician
George Harrison Quotes
British
Musician
Henry Rollins Quotes
American
Musician
John Lennon Quotes
English
Musician
Madonna Ciccone Quotes
American
Musician
Moby Quotes
American
Musician
Nicki Minaj Quotes
American
Musician
Patti Smith Quotes
American
Musician
Thom Yorke Quotes
English
Musician
Tori Amos Quotes
American
Musician