A Quote by Madonna Ciccone

One of the things that helps me tell a story through music is to create a character. I have to have a muse, whether it's Frida Kahlo, Martha Graham, Marlene Dietrich, or Pippi Longstocking.
I've made a point throughout my girls' lives of reading them bedtime stories about strong, innovating women, whether it's Oprah Winfrey or Frida Kahlo.
Frida Kahlo taught me a lot without ever bragging about anything.
Music helps me tell my story. That's where I can really be heard. But there's so much focus on the things that aren't music.
If you have an extreme character, you need normal characters to contrast them. Sherlock Holmes certainly needed a Dr. Watson. And Pippi Longstocking, who supposedly inspired Lisbeth Salander, needed Tommy and Annika, the normal middle-class neighbors.
I love Frida Kahlo.
Music helps define the character and is an extension of the character somehow, so that you are able to use both the songs themselves and the way that you sing them to tell something about the character and his story, as well as develop a performance style.
I'm a music storyteller and collaborator. I hear character, location, and story as music. For me a score is there to both heighten the story and to actually tell the story with the unique emotional and narrative powers of music.
The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb.
There's nothing wrong with a thick eyebrow; Frida Kahlo had them.
Did they look like anyone we know? For example… a cross between Pippi Longstocking and the Wicked Witch of the West would obviously give us Marcie Millar
The concept of muse is alien to me. To speak of a muse implies there is a couple in which one person is the objectified passive element - there to help the creative, active, often male part of the duo to create. A muse is very passive. Who wants a muse? I don't want a muse.
Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
Everything, for me, is fueled off telling my story through music, because I have a lot to say, and it's some urgent things that I have to tell to the world, and help and heal. I know my part that I have to do through music.
People like Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Marlene Dietrich and Sammy Davis Jr. all walked me down this path of entertainment.
One of the things I most wanted to do in New York was to go to a performance by Martha Graham. For me, she's Miss Mattie T. Graham. I thought she needed something in the middle. If she's going to be an honorary Southerner, she's got to have something in the middle, so I just put an initial T and a period.
That's always my ambition is to create a character out of what will help tell the story. I've never been an actor to say my character wouldn't do that, because he should do that in order to help tell the story.
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