Alicia Keys (Alicia Augello Cook) Quotes
When I perform in front of large audiences, I'm much more comfortable, because I've already performed in front of tiny audiences - which is much harder, honestly. The smaller you strip things down, the more you depend on the songs and yourself, as opposed to arrangements.
Quotes to Explore
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I don't really like to explain my songs.
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Many of the songs on Undertow were written at the time Opiate came out.
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I really believed that my songs were good enough for the whole world to listen to. I had fans from America or the U.K. who would be like, 'Oh my God, I love your music'.
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So many songs are just a wink to the audience, but people take them seriously. 'My Humps?' C'mon!
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Everything I record, I just try to sound like me and come up with songs that suit what I do and then just go for it. I never know what the public's going to like, anyway.
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I love writing songs.
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I tend to name albums after one of the songs.
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With my songs I tried to prove that there is love.
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A letdown is worth a few songs. A heartbreak is worth a few albums.
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Every battalion has its marching songs.
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I don't have many easy songs.
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The songs I love to sing are story songs, from Yiddish songs to Tom Waits.
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I am about the arrangements and the layers of depth in the music.
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I love the smell of a theater. The old rooms and the carpet and all that stuff. I love to tell stories. Even before I was doing music, I saw myself as a director. So most of my songs come in a play form, you know, where there are characters and stories, so I like to go beyond just the song sometimes.
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Audiences are quite happy to be astonished, and they don't care who does that astonishing.
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I'm a lover of songs.
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We lived, ate, and breathed pop songs.
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Dad really had little to do with the songs, except to perform them.
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To have great poets, there must be great audiences.
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A songwriter writes songs all the time, whereas just writing a song can be done by anyone, anytime.
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In fact, after Donald Trump won, some of the relief of finishing record was to turn off all the politics for a while. There were some songs that had more of the political stuff that we just decided to wait on and put aside. A few weeks after the election, I stopped watching cable news and just unplugged. My way of dealing with the new situation we're in was to just work on something that I care about.
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Confronted by outstanding merit, there is no way of saving one's ego except by love.
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The author with the greatest influence on me is my friend Stephen Harrigan, who critiques everything I write before I even bother to show it to my agent or editor. He's a truly great writer - author of Gates of the Alamo and other books you might know of, and his instincts about what's working in a story, and what's not, are just about perfect. My books would be very different without his influence.
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When I perform in front of large audiences, I'm much more comfortable, because I've already performed in front of tiny audiences - which is much harder, honestly. The smaller you strip things down, the more you depend on the songs and yourself, as opposed to arrangements.
