A Quote by Kurt Elling

A lot of people are put off by the idea of scat singing. Either that or it's something to be made fun of. — © Kurt Elling
A lot of people are put off by the idea of scat singing. Either that or it's something to be made fun of.
Never put off till tomorrow what you can put off till the day after tomorrow. Like a variant of the song, Tomorrow, only it's more of the idea, the Mexican idea of mañana, you know, [singing] mañana, mañana, I love you, mañana, you're always a day away.
I had a little bit of a vocal strain at a certain period of time that made me lay off the singing, and while I was lying off the singing, I was pursuing the acting.
I've never thought that it made sense to put something out that I didn't actually find really fun to read. Or, if not "fun," engaging. My tastes are whatever they are, but I may be a little bit afraid of certain kinds of density. I may get turned off by certain kinds of show-offyness.
I've known people who had fantastic ideas, but who couldn't get the idea off the ground because they approached everything weakly. They thought that their ideas would somehow take off by themselves, or that just coming up with an idea was enough. Let me tell you something - it's not enough. It will never be enough. You have to put the idea into action. If you don't have the motivation and the enthusiasm, your great idea will simply sit on top of your desk or inside your head and go nowhere.
My acting started with musicals in elementary school, so singing is something I've always done, never done professionally - so you're not going to find me on "The Voice" or anything - but it is something that I have a lot of fun doing, and can do well enough to keep up with people in shows.
Well, at first the band were simply called Horsepower, but a lot of people thought that was something to do with heroin. That really pissed me off, so I decided to put something in front of it to distract them. “I got '16' from a traditional American folk song, where a man is singing about his dead wife and 16 black horses are pulling her casket up to the cemetery. I liked the image of 16 working horses.
A lot of science fiction is very accessible and very readable, but a lot of people are justifiably put off by the covers of spaceships - though that never put me off.
The idea of 'talking white,' a lot of people grew up around that, just the idea that if you speak with proper diction and come off as educated that it's not black and that it's actually anti-black and should be considered only something that white people would do.
It's not something a lot of people would think, but I constantly put things off.
A label's typical plan would be to put something out that's safer and get fans, and then push buttons, but my idea is to push buttons first, scare off the people who are gonna be scared off, and then the right people will like you for who you really are, and stay with you.
The idea of singing and dancing throughout my life and finding that bliss is something I wanted to express and explore within myself and hopefully spread that idea to other people.
All my life, people have made fun of the way I speak. I guess because a lot of my vocabulary is made up of things that other people say. I started making fun of them and imitating them and now that's how I speak.
If I made a mistake in singing a song or in the script, I could have some fun with it, then retain any of the fun that sounded amusing.
If I hear Anna say something, and I completely misheard her say it, and she goes, 'That's not what I said, but that's a great idea.' Whose idea was it? It was nobody's idea. It came out of thin air, but it was a misunderstanding. That's really what's fun about having a partner to throw ideas off of. Sometimes you get those good accidents.
I spent a lot of time, a lot of energy trying to be a better artist and I still [do]. I spend a lot of time focusing on my craft. If you're going to take your passion into something beyond just something for fun on the side, you got to spend a lot of time on it to be great, and then you've got to make smart decisions about who you collaborate with [and] where you live [to] put yourself in the right situations to meet the right people to catch those breaks.
By the 6th grade I stopped doing ordinary things in front of people. It had been ordinary to sing, kids are singing all the time when they are little, but then something happens. It's not that we stop singing. I still sang. I just made sure I was alone when I did it. And I made sure I never did it accidentally. That thing we call 'bursting into song.' I believe this happens to most of us. We are still singing, but secretly and all alone.
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