A Quote by Sevyn Streeter
Music is emotional. Your job is to make people feel something. The best way to do that is to sing and speak from something they've personally been through. That's where I write from.
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Music is a lot more powerful than anyone gives it credit for. I can sing something right now and make you feel something that you would not feel if I said it. If somebody can sing and connect to people just through voice, just through sonics, capturing an emotion, that's a direct string to somebody's soul.
For me, writing music is a way of processing the world. It's not a concrete thing, as in, "This piece is about giraffes." It's much more of an emotional sort of thing. I want people to find something out about themselves through my music, something that was inaccessible before, something that they were suppressing, something that they couldn't really confront.
I don't like to veer away from the truth because I think that's what people have fallen in love with about my music. It's honest. I can't portray to you something that I've never been through or something I didn't watch someone close to me go through. It's the best way for people to get to me know.
Music can help you through any kind of emotion. It can help you through a break-up, make you dance, or help you realize or understand something about yourself... and if I can sing a song and make someone feel those things then I will feel like I have made a difference.
I don't mean it egotistically, but I've been given the chance to be in front of people and sing, and I feel that it's part of my job and my duty - especially where I'm from - to speak the language of the people I'm around and speak for them.
I know where my heart is and I know that I can make people feel something with my music. I'm quite confident in what I am doing, so if I can also make a song that people want to put in ten times during a party and makes them happy, then I think that is also good. I feel that playfulness is something that has entered my life a lot more in the last couple of years. I'm not taking everything too seriously. I think that is something that comes with age - I hope. I feel that music is much more fun for me than it has ever been.
I feel that when I listen to music - not that it's bad - it's not emotional. It has a gimmick to it. It's selling something: the artist, the producer, something. The emotional capacity is very small, for the listener as well.
Dance music is an emotional journey. It's how well you can make people feel something that they haven't felt.
I take pride in my music, I feel like it actually does something for people personally, in their personal lives, so it's real music and it helps people get through things like I was able to get through things.
As a songwriter, you're never off - for me, anyway. There's a certain mentality of people that decide, "Oh, we're going to try to write songs from this time of the day to this time of the day." Almost treat it like a real job. I can't do that. I've never been able to write songs like that. You never know when something creative is going to hit you, or emotion or whatever. You can take it, and turn it into something that makes somebody feel something. I love that about my job.
You're creating music to pull people into a world, whether it be a visual medium where music is just one element, or a purely musical medium. Either way, you're trying to transport people and to create a connection. I've always felt that the best films and the best albums can be the best company. If people feel a little bit less alone because of something I had a hand in creating than I feel like I'm contributing to the world in a positive way.
Eventually, when I got the 'Meadowland' script, I saw something in it that made me think I could make something special out of it, something that could work with my style. Emotionally, I connected to it. I thought, 'If I feel this way just imagining it, maybe we can make that happen on screen and make people feel something when they watch it.'
I personally feel that there's a lot of music journalism that is dominated by genre, because you need a language in which to write, but actually the things that strike people about music, are very hard to write about, and its sonic connections, it's a sense of harmony that I think we all have even if we don't know how to express it - it's something musical, it's synapse connections in our brain.
Music needs to have a real sacred setting for people to understand it. You've got to start things off with friends who are like-minded or even strangers that are like-minded. Sending your music to established artists or labels or magazine, I mean there is something to be said for tenacity, for trying to pursue recognition that way, but it just doesn't make sense for the best work. And if you do make an amazing work, it's sometimes not the best way to be heard. You have to get on a sacred space, like a stage, and do your testifying that way.
Don't take anything personally. Even when a situation seems so personal, even if others insult you directly, it has nothing to do with you. Their point of view and opinion come from all the programming they received growing up. When you take things personally, you feel offended and your reaction is to defend your beliefs and create conflict. You make something big out of something so little because you have the need to be right and make everybody else wrong.
Make the decision that you'll no longer use excuses to keep you from what you know is in your best interest. Today, act on something you've always avoided and explained away with a convenient excuse. Make a phone call you've been putting off, write a letter to a friend, put on a pair of walking shoes and go for a stroll, clean out your closet—do something you've been justifying not doing with excuses.
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