Ask any rapper or singer what artist they are an expert on. What artist are they looking to emulate, and really, what artist is the one person they are an expert on? You see, if you want any kind of longevity, if you want any kind of legacy, you need to know what ancestral line you are from.
I want to grow as an artist, and I'm taking a step out. I want my music to mature.
I want to grow as an artist and I'm taking a step out, I want my music to mature.
Those titles, Executive Producer or actor, are unimportant. I always try to approach my role as an artist. The first thing you want to do, that you attempt to do as an artist, is to have some sort of input into the material that you are working on. That is how my process begins; I say to myself: "I want to do this kind of work or I want to do that kind of work."
The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals.
It takes a different kind of thinking to solve a problem than the kind of thinking which produced the problem.
The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist.
My job as an artist, as I see it, is to understand and in some cases to take on various ways of thinking about people and the world that are different from my own, sometimes radically different.
The only way for me to be an artist is to be honest in my craft. If I veer from that, I'm not giving the investors what they want. Sometimes it's my job as an artist to know what I want to do, even when the fans tell me different.
I think an artist can fit under a few different categories depending on how much you explore your creativity. It can vary from artist to artist from musician to performer to vocalist. I thrive on creativity. So in the long run I want to be an all around entertainer.
When you are writing for an artist you are trying to get into that artist's point of view. What does that artist want to say? What do they care about? And musically, you want to show off that artist.
I really love New York, and I've lived here for a long time. I know not just the different neighborhoods but the different kind of class cultures in New York from the up-and-coming, down-and-out kind of artist to the powerful worlds of finance.
People want to see a movie that casts a mature woman across from a mature man.
I never planned to be a professional artist - I just want to be a sustainable artist. I guess they're the same thing if you look at them from a different angle.
I feel that I want what allows me to reach the largest number of people as possible, and I don't feel ashamed of that. I think I'm the kind of artist that's meant to be on a major label because my music is different.
My whole life, I was thinking of names for kids, and I had a couple of kind of different names. I just didn't want him to be one of the crowd, with a - no offense to people with these names, but I don't want him to be a Bob, Dave, Harry, Larry.