I'm still trying to re-create a Ray Charles concert that I heard when I was fifteen years old, and all my nerve endings were fried and transformed, and electricity shot through me.
My parents were music lovers and collectors. It was around.
I think the women - Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, Erykah Badu - are doing new conceptual things and using their voices to create new American music.
I'm easily distracted by other things in the world around me.
My earliest influences were things I heard in my household.
This is a cause that musicians can take to heart because one of our main reasons for being is to share our music with other people, and this takes us to people who probably wouldn't otherwise get to hear music on quite this level.
My songwriting and my style became more complex as I listened, learned, borrowed and stole and put my music together.
There is not a lot that keeps me glued to the radio as I used to be.
From the time I moved to San Francisco in 1967 to play with the Steve Miller Band, there was a lot of support in the music community for one cause or another, but this one was special because it was put on by people who understood where musicians' hearts are.
A lot of what I have always done is do other singers.
I love working with the quartet. I have more freedom and flexibility.
My first love was the sound of guitar.
As a guitar player, you can gravitate to the blues because you can play it easily. It's not a style that's difficult to pick up. It's purely emotive and dead easy to get a start with.
As far as other instrumentalists, I used to love mellow sax players like Paul Desmond. I love piano.
I am not a jazz singer. I wouldn't place myself on that footing. I wouldn't even enter that arena.
I feel fortunate that I was able to step away from it when I wasn't interested.
I felt that, in retrospect, there was a time in the late Seventies, after I had a string of hits and successes, as a performer and a recording artist, that I wasn't saying anything.
I listened to classical guitar and Spanish guitar, as well as jazz guitar players, rock and roll and blues. All of it. I did the same thing with my voice.
I love all kinds of music.
I really just followed my musical instincts every step of my life.
