A Quote by Lisa Stansfield
Singers like Gladys Knight are mostly responsible for how I learned to sing.
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Of all the soul divas, Gladys Knight was the one for me. Knight's always been about tone and heart, none of the big showboating or extraneous doodling. She nailed a melody and only played a little around the edges like Ma Staple.
I like Gladys Knight and Patti LaBelle. I would love to do songs with them.
Being around people like Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight, Dionne Warwick and Roberta Flack, all these greats, I was taught to listen and observe.
I've never had a very quiet voice. I tried in choir to make it smaller, and it just didn't work out. And I listened to a lot of soul music when I was growing up on my own accord. But I was mostly into Mama Cass and Gladys Knight, and they all had big voices too; just different than mine.
Then when Gladys Knight came in to do my songs that was the straw that broke the camel's back.
The toughest question has always been, "How do you get your ideas?" How do you answer that? It's like asking runners how they run, or singers how they sing. They just do it!
When I seemed to be irritable or sad, my father would quote the learned Dr. Knight, and then say, 'Just go to sleep.' Like all smart aleck kids, I thought the advice was silly. But as I've grown older, I've realized just how smart Knight was.
There weren't any white people in this country who didn't know who Gladys Knight was. Or the Pips were, as far as that's concerned.
I have mad love for the way we were taught and trained back in the day. I mean, those of us - like Chaka Khan, Patti LaBelle, Gladys Knight - we didn't give into this new wave of celebrity.
My mom actually had a band called Six Pack - even though there were seven of them - who went around Chicago performing popular songs. Her voice was like Gladys Knight mixed with Aretha Franklin.
Even before coming into the industry, I was a big fan of Motown, the Jackson 5, Gladys Knight, the Temptations, Diana Ross and The Supremes.
Everybody's family plays them music, and my grandma used to play a lot of old-school stuff, like Ron Isley and Gladys Knight. Earth, Wind & Fire is the one I started paying attention to. My uncle introduced me to R&B, like Dru Hill, 112 and all those dudes.
People are getting more used to another language; that's how I learned English and Spanish. I listened to other singers and tried to sing with them. Of course, I studied it, and I took classes, but music helps me a lot.
As a kid, I was big into Al Green, Gladys Knight and the Pips, but as I got older, I started listening to all sorts of music, including country.
It wasn't until my late teens that I really got into soul music and then I was like 'Ooh, this is good!' You'd always here it at old family parties, like, Gladys Knight and I'd always love it but I didn't really get to know it and respect it until I was a bit older.
When I was 5, 'American Bandstand' had a lot of good artists on there, man. That's when I really started falling in love with the jams: Gladys Knight & the Pips, Patti LaBelle, Bootsy Collins, Parliament.
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