D'Angelo Quotes D'Angelo The stage is our pulpit, and you can use all of that energy and that music and the lights and the colors and the sound. But you know, you've got to be careful. Careful Colors Energy Know Lights Music Pulpit Stage You
Prince, you never knew what to expect from him from one album to the next. Miles Davis was like that. You know, once you get used to one style, boom, he switched it and, you know, switched gears on you. So those artists are very exciting to me, very exciting to follow their path, you know, and their journey. D'Angelo
I think it just takes one little snowflake to start a snowball to go down the hill. My contribution and, say, Kendrick Lamar's and some chosen others' start the snowball. That's all I can hope for. I don't know if I'm comfortable being quote-unquote a leader. D'Angelo
You have to know the forces that are against you and that are trying to break you down. We talk about the problems facing the black community: the decimation of the black family; the mass incarceration of the black man; we're talking about the brutality against black people from the police. The educational system. D'Angelo
The thing with me is, about that – about rock and all that – years and years of crate-digging, listening to old music, you kind of start to connect the dots. And I was seeing the thread that was connecting everything together, which is pretty much the blues. And everything soul or funk kind of starts with that. D'Angelo
I think shortly after I got signed, it just started to dawn on me that I had something to say and that Yahweh put something in my heart to share with the world. D'Angelo
It's about people rising up in Ferguson and in Egypt and in Occupy Wall Street and in every place where a community has had enough and decides to make change happen. It's not about praising one charismatic leader but celebrating thousands of them… 'Black Messiah' is not one man. It's a feeling that, collectively, we are all that leader. D'Angelo
Aretha Franklin was as important to the civil-rights movement as Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. Artists can choose to take on the tremendous amount of responsibility we have, or choose to ignore it. D'Angelo
Just about the entirety of the first album, 'Brown Sugar,' I wrote it, the majority of that record in my bedroom in Richmond. And all of the demos for it were done on a four-track in my bedroom. I think EMI was a little leery of me being in the studio producing it on my own, which is what I was fighting for. D'Angelo
I played a lot of keyboards, but I really wanted to produce the sound that was in my head that I was trying to emulate on the keys. I wanted to do it for real. And it makes me look at the keys in a different way. So it's like I'm looking at the guitar and bass more like meat and potatoes and keys like coloring over top of it, you know. D'Angelo
When I was young, I had an 'aha' moment in church. There was a thing called testimony service, and somebody would sing a song, and everyone else would join in, finding a note where they fit. During one of those, a light went on in my head. In that moment, I heard everything – Parliament, the Staple Singers, Curtis Mayfield, Prince – in there. D'Angelo
Art isn't held with the same high regard as it is after success. In any country, in any language, you're a loser if you're making music until you prove otherwise. K'naan
No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used, not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists. Vladimir Putin
I love – you know, I'm a big fan of Prince and Curtis Mayfield and Smoky Robinson. It's something to be said about a man who can be very masculine but still display that sensitive side, and that falsetto does it perfectly. D'Angelo