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There is not a lot that keeps me glued to the radio as I used to be.
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My earliest influences were things I heard in my household.
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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.
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A lot of what I have always done is do other singers.
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I love working with the quartet. I have more freedom and flexibility.
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I'm not a jazz singer.
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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.
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My songwriting and my style became more complex as I listened, learned, borrowed and stole and put my music together.
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As far as other instrumentalists, I used to love mellow sax players like Paul Desmond. I love piano.
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My parents were music lovers and collectors. It was around.
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I feel fortunate that I was able to step away from it when I wasn't interested.
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My first love was the sound of guitar.
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I'm easily distracted by other things in the world around me.
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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.
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I really just followed my musical instincts every step of my life.
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The short answer is, yes, I think I have become a better singer.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I am not a jazz singer. I wouldn't place myself on that footing. I wouldn't even enter that arena.
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I was a guitar player first off.
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I think that it can be said of a lot of artists, and myself included, that we made the same record over and over from the beginning.
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I love all kinds of music.
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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.