Lizz Wright
Gardening is a working meditation for me. It helps me remember process, and it helps me remember patience.Collection: Gardening
The whole musical institution of the church involves a lot of different styles of communication at the same time. Things like call and response. Sometimes they use the music to pray and work things out. And there's so much repetition in gospel, it's like churning butter.Collection: Communication
My father was very strict, a very militant parent, because he wanted us to be very focused kids. He sold the televisions, so we didn't watch TV. And he didn't want any music playing that wasn't gospel or inspirational music. In fact, he didn't even like a lot of gospel because he thought it was too bluesy.Collection: Inspirational
The truth is, when you want a great show, it's not 'entertaining' the audience - it's you sharing with them... an experience of communion.Collection: Experience
I've always loved the woods, and I've always loved gardening and a lot of solitude and quiet.Collection: Gardening
My mom has a couple great tricks, but my father is consistently a good cook. He's extremely avid about health and fitness and a bit obsessive. He always talks about garden-fresh food.Collection: Fitness
As I grow older, I hope I can fully embody my grandmother's remarkable peace.
I come from a family that has grown their own food from well into times of slavery, provided for themselves and people around them. So I found, through conversations about the earth and about the house with my neighbors, a lot of common ground.
I've begun to realize, as I'm getting older, that I was taught to go for a certain kind of stillness to get things done. I missed that in my life. I loved my grandmother's property, out in South Georgia right above the Florida line, so I just thought I'd find some property where I could feel that again.
Music is primal: when it's done without pretension, you can really feel the shape of someone's soul.
A lot of people in the African-American community are raised by grandmothers, and that relationship is a special bond and circle.
By high school, I was putting the music for the services together and teaching Sunday school to everybody's kids.
I think of myself as an interpretative singer and a songwriter.
Where I fit genre-wise, it's hard to tell. It's a fickle wind. But I have to believe there's always going to be a place for the songs inside of me.
Whoever is playing with me, they participate in the arrangement; I learned from Craig Street to really pool the stories and the skill and the voices of everybody around you on the bandstand to build an arrangement in the moment.
I see 'Grace' as an affectionate refusal of things that just aren't true. With all our power and money and influence, we still can't raise up high over people's consciousness.
If we work on it, we can absolutely refuse any notion that suggests that after generations of contributing to this country, being a part of the bones and the marrow, that I'm supposed to be uncomfortable here.
I never left jazz. The relationship between structure and improvisation - that constant conversation and tension - I've always wanted in every genre and song that I perform.
Jazz has a lot to do with being very present. You know the structure, then you flow through it.
Jazz has provided the framework for all the other stuff that I've done.
There's a beautiful, kind of seductive trap in being autobiographical in our writing of songs: We just get stuck in our own syrup, and it's so personal that it almost can be embarrassing to the listener.
I'm a preacher's kid, I'm big-boned, I have giant feet, and I've always been able to run fast, and so I had this sense of, 'I can't fail. I'm invincible. I'm made of green juice and concrete; nothing's gonna happen to me.'
I think living in a way that's close to nature makes you feel like that - makes you feel how thin the veil is between life and death.
I'm so grateful for just the inherent mercy of life.
I come from a lineage of ministers.
The women and the men are teachers and preachers in my family, and a little bit of both those fell on me.
I'm a real Otis Redding fan, and I just think he sounds so good. He sounds like he's always at the end of a long day, and he just won't give up. I just love his wearied devotion - that beautiful, beautiful, weathered sound.
Salif Keita's one of my favorite artists.
'Moffou' is one of my favorite records.
Everyone I perform and tour with looks out for each other; we ensure we stay healthy.
I studied opera for a year at Georgia State University, but I wasn't interested in that meticulous, technical approach to music. So I left school and went back to jazz.
I have no ancestral link to the mountains. But I really do feel close to mountain culture. Their ways of food, of thinking. The way they hang out with no recording devices and just sing songs with each other.
It's hard to know who you are until you're cracked open a little bit.
Surrender is working with what happens.
The church is an institution of music and of production and performance, and it has to do with taking people to places inside of themselves and giving them an opportunity to sit deep in their own feelings, and to be together and deeply alone at the same time, and to process things.
I live just above a creek, and it's always very active. It almost sounds like the ocean. It's constant, and there's lots of big rocks in it, so it's got a great sound. It's one of my favorite things.
As a southern woman, we often define ourselves by who we are with. But I wanted my life to be built differently.
Making a record and being a touring artist is about cooperation between spirit, craft, emotion, and focus.
I love talking to other musicians on tour and finding out what we all have to do, not just as artists but as business people. A lot of us are investing and trying to use social media. It is such an interesting level of responsibility and engagement on all these levels. I don't know how one can do this without absolute commitment and faith.
I am more prolific when I have something to respond to. I get my juice from people and real stories and things that seem common but are amazing.
I think, as singers and performers, we are ambassadors of the human experience. I don't want to get bored just talking about myself.
I call myself a singer-songwriter influenced by the gospel and jazz tradition. Naturally, because of my lifestyle and love for nature, there's a lot of folk and Americana there because that's just my life.
I let the song guide me. I move through the space that I'm given rather than trying to make an impression on the material. I'm curious to learn from the music.
I love songs that create moments that are very personal and that tell a story.
I'd been trained in choral, gospel, and a little bit of opera.
We had no television, and I only heard the radio when my parents went out to a Bible study group. They liked a quiet, meditative house.
I've always been genuinely interested in the spirit world. I've seen things I will never talk about because I'd be a fool to. You can't lay out that world in words.
No matter what happens, I can go back to the mountains. I have nature and my wonderful friends and neighbors. I get so much by being there.
I love singing all types of genres.
I want to record, tour, and just live life.