A Quote by Teena Marie

There were times I used to go to parties when I was, you know, like 15-, 16-years-old, and I'd always bring my guitar, and all my friends would be like, sing one of the Smokey songs. And everything I sang was his music, and I could sound just like him.
I always knew I would sing. I just didn't know if I would be successful or not. But I sang at school, I sang at parties, I sang at church. Everyone always asked me to sing. I'd be playing football with my friends and my parents would ask me to sing for their guests. I was never very happy about that because I wanted to play football.
I always knew I would sing. I just didn't know if I would be successful or not. But I sang at school, I sang at parties, I sang at church. Everyone always asked me to sing. I'd be playing football with my friends, and my parents would ask me to sing for their guests. I was never very happy about that because I wanted to play football.
I'm not going to say I'm not a fan, but I'm a fan of house music, essentially, and kind of indie, and I was always into the kind of sub-pop Seattle Mud Honey and Pearl Jam kind of sound. But my kind of big love was house music ever since I was 15/16, going to raves when I was 15 or 16 years old and not going to school, like a naughty boy.
I've always loved the songs of the sea. I was first introduced to them back in 1957, at the Old Town School of Folk Music. I used to go to Pete Seeger concerts, and he would do songs like 'Ruben Ranzo' and talk about how the sailors sang songs to do their work - to raise the anchors, pull up the sails and that sort of thing.
Electronic music was just discovery about sound, all our sound options. The core percussions and melodies, they forget about it, they didn't think about those those for a good four, five years, because they were just discovering the new tools and what they could do with them, you know? The big folk revival, I think is a backlash against that. And now, I think they'll probably try to find somewhere in the middle. It's interesting. It's like push-and-pull. It's always like that, you know? Music history is always like that, this repeating evolution of music.
I used to play Saturday night shows with different little groups. If I could get a show, I would do it. I used to do mad things - I used to go and do these shows and go on my knees and roll on the ground - when I was 15,16 years old. And my parents were extremely disapproving of it all. Because it was just not done. This was for very low-class people, remember. Rock & roll singers weren't educated people
I used to sing Bill Monroe songs. And I'd sing Dennis Day songs like songs that he sang on the Jack Benny show.
Rick Rubin said, well, I don't know that we will sell records. He said, I would like you to go with me and sit in my living room with a guitar and two microphones and just sing to your heart's content everything you ever wanted to record. I said, that sounds good to me. So I did that. And day after day, three weeks, I sang for him.
There are people who will always want the genre, whatever it is, to stay traditional, to stay what it was like when you were 15 years old, but I just don't think music does that. Music is always changing and evolving, just like us as people.
A lot of times, that's hard to capture: what you sound like in person versus what you sound like on record. If I had total control, I would do a lot of the old songs - not only my songs but Sam Cooke songs, Luther Vandross, melody songs. That's what I would really do if I had an opportunity to do a record.
There was things just like not being able to date or - I'm talking like 15, 16 - like just certain things that my friends started to do. Like, they started to get phone calls from girls or like, you know, go and hang out 10, 11 at night, kind of going to the movies. There were just certain things that - it's not that I couldn't do all of those things. It's just that every choice was really deliberate and conscious and thought out and sort of balanced against the religion in a way where I felt - I wasn't necessarily trying to convert at 12 like [my mother] was.
I think when we were making the first album, we were like 16, 17 years old, and I think just years and years of recording and playing shows - I know me, personally, I kind of figured out my style more and vocally learned a better way to sing in the studio.
I always sang around the house. My brother and I would sing songs like 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame' and stuff like that.
I remember when I was 15 or 16 years old, I couldn't imagine what life would be like past the age of 30, just because I didn't know that many men who had lived beyond their 20s.
A cello can sound like so many instruments, but it's only one, you know, like a guitar; it has percussive qualities. It can sing like the violin, you know, like a voice.
I wrote all my songs on my main instruments, and the songs I would record in my bedroom were just acoustic guitar, mandolin, and sometimes bass. I really like the texture the mandolin added to my music, but my fingers were too big to play it... I could only do little riffs and whatever.
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