When I listen to most forms of music, in their most raw and pure, it all has a punk edge to me, like Lead Belly, Jimmie Rodgers, Otis Redding or Nirvana.
I was just a music lover who wondered what it would sound like if Otis Redding strapped on a guitar and played in a punk band. That's it.
I was just a music lover who wondered what it would sound like if Otis Redding strapped on a guitar and played in a punk band. Thats it.
When I do listen to music, I'm more prone to listen to the people I've always listened to: George Jones, Otis Redding, Alison Krauss and Emmylou Harris.
Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.
My dad loved jazz, so there was a little Miles Davis, Otis Redding, Donny Hathaway. My mum is French, so she'd listen to a lot of French music, but a lot of the music that actually formed my taste, I just found online.
I love the pioneers like Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, but when I write music, it comes out in my own way.
Where I came from in the country, there was no place to hear pop music like Little Richard and people like that. Later, I heard James Brown, Otis Redding, The Drifters, The Four Aces, The Ink Spots.
Remember those black-and-white films with Frank Sinatra? Those guys looked like men and they were only 27! Listen to Otis Redding singing 'Try A Little Tenderness'. That was a man who understood what a man has to know in the world. Show me a real man now! Where are they?
When I was 14, I heard Otis Redding in a club local to me, and I was blown away. It leaped out at me and went straight to my heart. I set my sights on singing like that.
It was a free-for-all; the BBC wouldn't play anything so we had pirate radio playing the African-American music and the Beatles and greats like Howlin' Wolf and Robert Johnson and Motown's Martha Reeves and the Vandellas and Otis Redding.
I listen to all kinds of bands. I like rock music, like, male rock bands. I'm more into that instead of female singers. I like Nirvana, Green Day, System Of A Down. I also like punk rock, and I love bands like Coldplay.
I listen to a lot of Nashville local music, which, for the most part, is punk and grunge music but also alt-country stuff down here.
People like Sam Cooke and Otis Redding - I do not put myself in that category.
I grew up loving Etta James and Aretha Franklin and Al Green and Otis Redding, and I just love old-school R&B. It's just music that moves you and grooves you, and it was very important, I think, for music.
My parents' record collection was the music I was hearing as long as I can remember, and I would play Otis Redding over and over again.
I want people to see an honesty within me. I'm not trying to be the next Sam Cooke or Otis Redding.