A Quote by Nellie McKay
In the hierarchy of instruments, if you're a harpist, you're considered someone with a brain much more than if you're a singer.
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In the hierarchy of instruments, if you're a harpist, you're considered someone with a brain much more than if you're a singer. Even though singers, particularly singers who can play piano... If you go to the office of career development, you can get a gig much easier. Still, musicians tend to look down on you. I think they've got some nerve, because if they could sing, they would do it, but most of them can't.
My mom was a folk singer and Celtic harpist. My dad was in a barbershop quartet and my great grandma was an opera singer. As I grew up, I discovered pop music and Top 40 radio, but it was in the '90s, so music was very different then - it was really lyrical.
My mum is a singer and harpist, and my dad writes fantastic poetry, so we've grown up around a lot of words and music.
I'm much more convinced that the hierarchy comes from the monarchy, and that the hierarchy stays apart from the oligarchy. So the oligarchy is hurtful to the majority in Bolivia.
What I've learned is that unless it's an emergency, like a fire or brain surgery, hierarchy is not necessary and may be damaging. If you have a hierarchy, you're repeating the strengths and weaknesses of one person without allowing for the accumulative strength of a group.
It's perhaps not so much how your amygdala is tuned that makes you politically extreme, but that your intrinsic nervousness makes you more responsive to things that might seem to threaten your particular social world. Education probably plays an important role in dampening that response by allowing the brain's frontal lobes (where much of the brain's conscious work goes on) to counteract the emotional responses with a more considered view, so explaining why education is invariably the friend of liberal politics.
There's a really rough and relatively consistent hierarchy of concerns. My musical interests come first and principally my fascination with how notes and rhythms interlock. Then comes the technical side like programming, instruments and designing instruments. Next is production and mixing and beyond that I start to care less.
I think there is a misconception that when people are the face of something, or they're the voice, especially when they're young women, that they're being created or molded by someone else. I think more so than not wanting to be a singer I was afraid of being mislabeled as just a singer - not that that's a bad thing.
[Katharine Hepburn] was much stronger, much more opinionated than I am or ever was, and it was considered attractive on her. But not on me. I don't know. Maybe her Bryn Mawr accent was more appealing than mine.
Whenever people can access deities directly without the intervention of a religious hierarchy, they don't need to have hierarchy so much.
When you sing, you're releasing so much more than you are when you're speaking. You risk more as a singer.
I was more of a light opera singer, not really much of a lounge singer.
Jazz is not something that can be defined through blunt instruments. It is much more poetic than that.
A singer for me is more like someone who is standing alone with a microphone like Scott Walker, rather than someone who is bashing a plank and is spitting all over a microphone.
Not only are we not using any programmed loops or computers onstage, we're also improvising with our instruments. We're playing our instruments probably more so than most people that I see play their instruments. I think we all sort of strive for that - we all want magical things to happen onstage. We don't say "mistakes" in this band, we call them "highlights."
We have learned more about the brain in the last fifteen years than in all prior human history, and the mind, once considered out of reach, is finally assuming center stage.
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