A Quote by Tori Amos

Sometimes listening to music can motivate you. It can. But if you're a musician, that isn't always the way to get new ideas because you don't want to take somebody else's ideas. You need to find your own. So if you go to different artistic mediums, whether it's dance or it's visual arts or films or books, stories, sometimes it gets you hearing things, hearing progressions that you wouldn't come up with if you were just listening to other music because you don't want to copy progressions you've just heard.
I collect art books. I have hundreds and hundreds of them and they get me to start hearing things. Sometimes people look at them, but I find that visual art gets me listening, gets me hearing things.
In a sense, I'm always hearing music of some sort, whether it's people talking or surface noise or whatever, because there is no privacy. So when I'm by myself, I just kind of like to be and reflect, and I can't do that when I'm listening to music. Because it's someone else's reflections, not mine.
I feed on other people's creativity, photographers, artists of every kind. Sometimes a feeling that you get listening to a song can be so powerful. I've wanted to write whole scripts around what I felt just listening to a piece of music. I think music is important, and surrounding your visual field with stimulating things.
But I feel like I developed my own love for hip-hop and rap music by myself. Just growing up and hearing new things. As you grow up, you begin to listen to new music that this kid is listening to, then you begin to like your own music, and start discovering it yourself.
Listening is totally different from hearing. Hearing, anybody who is not deaf can do. Listening is a rare art, one of the last arts. Listening means not only hearing with the ears but hearing from the heart, in utter silence, in absolute peace, with no resistance. One has to be vulnerable to listen, and one has to be in deep love to listen. One has to be in utter surrender to listen.
I have this problem in the rebirthing community because it's so powerful sometimes, I get thrown out because people want to do things a certain way and they are just not open to new ideas, so they don't want me to come around.
Ideas for stories come in really different terms and really different ways for me. Sometimes they're from books, sometimes they're just kind of out of the air, from nowhere, sometimes they're biographical, or sometimes they're other things [everyday life].
I am permanently a student of people who make great songs, but besides sort of learning by absorption, I just love listening to music, hearing what's going on, hearing new things or new old things.
Of course, even if the directors like my ideas or the designs I do, they may end up changing the story so much, that those characters have to change, or get cut out altogether, and that's just the way it is. Sometimes the directors are designers themselves, or they want to work with a character designer who will do things in their own distinct way - sometimes the most important thing I do is figure out what they don't want to do, by experimenting. Either way, whether they use my ideas or not, I get paid, so it's all good.
I was listening to Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd, because that was new music for me. I really hadn't been up on them. I mean, I'd heard of them, but I wasn't up on their music. And I kept listening to Radiohead, and I was like, Man, I want to make hip-hop that feels like Radiohead. I want to make hip-hop that can use guitars and soul and jazz and just fuse it all together.
The way I create music is maybe like a painting, to compose in a more visual way. Basically it's the music that I want to hear- that's my inspiration and bottom line. I just try to get ideas from books, movies, paintings.
In the past, I've written my songs and then asked friends if they could record the vocals. I didn't want to use my own voice, because other people have much better voices. I was hearing the music with a voice that I don't have. It was a case of pulling whatever resources I had to get the sound I wanted, but that doesn't take anything away from the authorship. They are songs written by me that sound the way I want them to sound. Whether it's my voice or someone else's doesn't make a difference to the music.
We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.
For me, changing the sound and listening to new music - that's just so fun. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. You're never going to please everybody. I feel that at the end of the day, I should make what I want to make since somebody is going to hate it and somebody is going to love it too. I can't control that.
To me, dance music is a lot of space - to listen to other things than melodies. I think club music and dance music really require a different way of listening.
With other people, you're always swapping music. Somebody is always listening to something you've never heard. It's a great way to hear all sorts of new things.
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