A Quote by Rag'n'Bone Man

At the start, it would kind of been more about freestyling. But then I started to sing over the beats. And then came a realisation that maybe I was alright at rapping, and people seemed to enjoy it, but when I sung, it was a real difference. Just the reaction of people, I was like, 'I think I should do that, cause it feels better.'
I started rapping towards the end of middle school. In high school, with a lot of my friends, we would make beats and just start rapping - beating on the wall, beating on the table and freestyling.
I think that being good to people - you'll never regret that. Maybe you'll get walked all over, maybe you'll get tricked, maybe you'll get fooled, but I think it's so much better to be kind to people and to trust people rather then to have your guard up and say mean things to people. You never want to be the reason that someone else feels bad.
Sometimes it feels like I've been in the business forever, but then other times, it feels like kind of a flash. Growing up, all I wanted to do was sing. All I wanted to do was get on a bus and ride around the country and sing for people and be a household name.
Ever since I was a little kid, I got bored, so I learned to sing, and I started singing lessons. And then anytime I was bored, I would start writing and start messing around on my computer, making beats. Then I got bored and started making YouTube videos; that changed my life in a big way.
I just looked in to stuff to do to keep me occupied. Alright, I'm gonna start dieting. I'm gonna start working out more. So then I started to lose weight, and then I started to see some results, and I started to drop some weight.
When I started out, maybe because I did Thelma & Louise early on - but people were always asking, "Are things better for women now?" I would say, "Yeah, I think so. It seems like it." Then a few years in, I started saying, "I think so. I'm getting a lot of good parts, but I don't know." Then eventually, I was like, "Google it. I don't know, but it doesn't seem great."
I started drinking when I was like 15, and by the time I was 19 everybody knew I was an alcoholic. So I would start five fights every weekend and lose terribly. First you start off fighting with one person and then he beats you up; and then one guy would be laughing, so you would hit him, too.
I like challenging myself. I like the challenge of rapping to fast beats, rapping to beats that are super slow, whatever. I like the challenges, so I'm not afraid to take on any piece of music and create a song to it if it feels right to me.
I was singing R&B before I was rapping, and I never really enjoyed it. But when I started rapping, I was like, 'This is sick - I'm actually alright at rapping!'
I thought for a long time that within art, that you would come up with an idea, you would labor over it intensely until you felt like it was done, and then when you finished it, that was the final stage. I started to realize that that's not actually the completion of it. The final stage of any kind of art is to really lose control over it and let it affect other people. You can't control the effect that it has on people, but you hope that it has some sort of reaction. You just hope that they're not indifferent to it, you wanna make people feel something, whether it's love or hate.
I'm not totally blind to the fact that I like people to see my work, but if it's not something I would enjoy seeing in a magazine, then I think I shouldn't be making it. I think that I don't represent only myself, I represent more people; I mean, if I like it, then I think more people will like it because I think I'm quite a normal guy.
I always wrote poems when I was a little girl, and I loved hip hop music, and I kind of just started writing poems over beats, and that's when I started rapping.
At the beginning I wasn't really rapping. I had poetry, so it was a spoken word vibe. Then I found beats that you could sing over - lo-fi, ambient stuff. So I was singing over them and trying to put things into practice.
I picked up the guitar when I was about 14 or 15 maybe, and then I started just messing around with loops on GarageBand, and just building my own beats in my bedroom and then just releasing that on SoundCloud.
I remember my mother would get upset with me 'cause she said I walked like my dad. But I think it was more like, there's something about you that's not quite ladylike and femme. And then when I got older - once I came out, my mom and grandma were horrified and just kind of like, where did we go wrong?
A lot of people seem to think I started this business. But rock 'n' roll was here a long time before I came along. Nobody can sing that kind of music like colored people. Let's face it: I can't sing like Fats Domino can. I know that.
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