Quite frankly, I've always listened to the black side of the radio dial. Where I grew up, there was a lot of it and there was a lot of live music around.

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.

My first love was the sound of guitar.

My songwriting and my style became more complex as I listened, learned, borrowed and stole and put my music together.

As far as other instrumentalists, I used to love mellow sax players like Paul Desmond. I love piano.

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 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.

My earliest influences were things I heard in my household.

I'm not a jazz singer.

I am not a jazz singer. I wouldn't place myself on that footing. I wouldn't even enter that arena.

Let your heart be your eye.

My greatest gratitude is the gift of life.

Let your dreams be a manifestation of your vision.

The goodnesses you do will beautifully cover you like the beautiful flowers covering a country house!

Birth is violent whether it be the birth of a child or the birth of an idea.

This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientists do, each in his own fashion.

It's not like learning how to hit a curve ball in baseball.

The sacrifice always has to be greater than the dream.

There is no dark side to love. Only a darker side to those we love

I am a proud Christian who has been greatly tutored by Hindus and Buddhists and Sufis and others, and I stand and I speak from that place.