A Quote by Lenny Kravitz
At first people thought I was really arrogant and a snob about music because I'm so intense about my production and sound, and because they knew I didn't like new music so much.
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I was born first to music. But I went into acting because my father knew so much about music he intimidated me. So, I picked an art form, he knew nothing about. So I could be my own man.
What's holding me up is I'm confused about the nature of the music. Because the modern music doesn't reach me. I mean to say the sound of the modern electric production. A lot of sequencers... synths. That's what people are buying. Because that doesn't reach me, it throws me back to like 1948, but I don't want to be there. Back there, I'm talking about blues records... The roots of rock'n'roll is rhythm and blues and that's like really where I'm at, where I was always at.
I feel like I've become less of a music snob and less of a snob about a lot of things because I realize I came off as such a bad person because of that.
I was criticized by some people for my first album because they said I was taking sacred music. They knew nothing about what I was doing. That was no sacred music; that's music I wrote.
Electronic music was just discovery about sound, all our sound options. The core percussions and melodies, they forget about it, they didn't think about those those for a good four, five years, because they were just discovering the new tools and what they could do with them, you know? The big folk revival, I think is a backlash against that. And now, I think they'll probably try to find somewhere in the middle. It's interesting. It's like push-and-pull. It's always like that, you know? Music history is always like that, this repeating evolution of music.
In New York, I was excited about the music in New York because the only music that I was more or less involved with in the South was either country and western or hillbilly music as we used to call it when I was a kid and, ah, gospel. There was no, there was no in between. And when I got to New York all the other musics that's in the world just came into my head whether it was the classics, jazz, I never knew what jazz was about all, had heard anything about jazz.
In a basic music way, my sense of melody and my style of songwriting and production carry the same thought process into the new music. I'm thinking about machines and electronics, and how they interact with motion, which I've touched upon in the past. Those key themes are my main interests, and they are really the foundation for my approach to music.
I never really made much money playing music. It's because I've never really worked with a producer who could make my music sound, I guess, like how the public wants it to sound.
I could draw up a list of about 30 artists who I apparently sound like. From Lady Gaga, to Katy Perry to Lana Del Rey. I don't know if it's because I'm versatile or because production affects how people judge music. I can't wait for a time I can just be classed as myself.
You know that one don't play music just for the hours to pass. But you play music because you are in love with music and luckily if it happens that people like what I'm proposing, then I'm happy. Although music is business, yet you don't start thinking about money from the initial stages when you are in music. First propose to the people what they want and if they like it, then the money comes later.
When I was a kid, it was so important to listen only to bands nobody had ever heard of. I missed out on so much interesting music because of my need to listen to a psychobilly band that only two people knew about... Because I thought I was cool.
Often, with our music, there's quite a lot going on, so people hear melodies that sound up and catchy, and production, and maybe don't really listen to what the songs are about, so it's nice to sing a song like 'The Currents' and really mean it.
Everyone has a fantasy of what they want their band to sound like. However, because I knew nothing about making music, I was unable to describe what I wanted properly.
"Only write what you know" is very good advice. I do my best to stick to it. I wrote about gods and dreams and America because I knew about them. And I wrote about what it's like to wander into Faerie because I knew about that. I wrote about living underneath London because I knew about that too. And I put people into the stories because I knew them: the ones with pumpkins for heads, and the serial killers with eyes for teeth, and the little chocolate people filled with raspberry cream and the rest of them.
I think there are people who really always have and always will care about the quality of music in general, about the sound of the music, things like that.
Because music wasn't free yet, they wouldn't really offer MP3s so you had to buy things to see if you liked it or not. Which is crazy if you think about how much music you bought and then didn't even like the stuff. It was a different world where bands made money off their music.
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