Once you encounter people who are really testing the limits of kindness, that’s when you start to build up a shield and close yourself down. – Meshell Ndegeocello
I’m pushing ahead on my own – you no longer need a large record company to make you a star. – Meshell Ndegeocello
I’m a true believer that unless you’re Prince or Stevie Wonder – and even Prince is showing that he needs help – not everybody can produce themselves. I’m definitely not that person. – Meshell Ndegeocello
Definitely dub is in my body forever. I think I hear everything through a dub filter. Even when I play rock music, I play through a dub filter. – Meshell Ndegeocello
Music is my only guide. I don’t care if people pigeonhole me. Miles Davis is my hero. He covered Cindy Lauper and Michael Jackson, and he didn’t give a hoot about what the purists said. – Meshell Ndegeocello
We’re all just bags of bones and muscle and hormones; I’ll never understand what makes our minds do the things we do. It’s like that statue of the monkey holding a skull. We’re trying to use a thing we don’t understand to understand ourselves. – Meshell Ndegeocello
You make a choice to make music or be an actor, and people automatically think they can have access to your life. – Meshell Ndegeocello
There’s no hierarchy in suffering. I think songs that are transcendent are the ones where everyone can feel something from it, you know? – Meshell Ndegeocello
Any ideas of ‘other’ are complicated, and otherness is relative to personal ideas of ‘normal.’ – Meshell Ndegeocello
I find myself wanting to make music at the dining room table or in the bedroom – I’m kind of a mobile writer, so I sort of move around the house. But the attic is definitely where I can make the most noise. While everyone on the lower floors screams ‘Earthquake!’ But no! It’s just my bass! – Meshell Ndegeocello
My father was a jazz tenor sax player. He played in a lot of big bands. So I had that sound around me all the time. The first record that really caught my ear was Clifford Brown’s ‘Brownie Eyes.’ I grew up listening to John Coltrane and Illinois Jacquet. This is where I come from… I love improvisational music. – Meshell Ndegeocello
I joke that a person of color would never make a movie like ‘Midnight in Paris.’ Nostalgia isn’t so enticing. – Meshell Ndegeocello
I think secretly I’ve realized after my time on the planet that I have no control over what people feel about me or need from me, so I just have a more laid-back approach in my apologies. – Meshell Ndegeocello
Yes, violence begets more violence, but historically this has been the way of the world. – Meshell Ndegeocello
I’m becoming more and more apolitical – I think the most revolutionary thing you can do is just live your life and have a good time. Before they scoop you up on the street or you die. – Meshell Ndegeocello
I love children. I’d prefer to be around children much more than adults, actually. And I like animals, too. I’m just really into beings who are at ease with themselves. – Meshell Ndegeocello
It’s interesting to do other people’s music – that’s how I learned to play, by learning other people’s songs. It’s nice to delve into how other people got to where they are. – Meshell Ndegeocello
It’s very limiting to us as a species, the concept of better-than/less-than. It just seems to be at its end. I’m like, this all fades to black, and it’s gone. It’s dust. Choose carefully what you obsess about. – Meshell Ndegeocello
I just try to tell a story with a song, and be able to try to transmit the emotion to you. That’s all I’m really trying to do. – Meshell Ndegeocello
My favorite period is when we lived in the land of the three-minute song. The Motown thing – I thought they were genius in knowing that’s as much as a listener can take. – Meshell Ndegeocello
