Solange Knowles Quotes
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I'm probably on the internet way more than I should be. I don't know. I love connecting people. I love introducing people to other people who are doing incredible work in the world. And I'm just on the internet too damn much.
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The Hadley Street Dream is a tribute to making a vision come to life. My father built a compound on a dessert city block, he saw something in that space we couldn't see. It was years later the album was born right there on Hadley St. He built the studio I started recording the album at.
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I was working through a lot of challenges at every angle of my life, and a lot of self-doubt, a lot of pity-partying. And I think every woman in her twenties has been there - where it feels like no matter what you are doing to fight through the thing that is holding you back, nothing can fill that void.
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I love music. But I'm not gonna work myself to death. If there ever comes a point where I'm not enjoying it, then I'm not gonna do it anymore. I've promised myself that. I've written it down on paper and signed a contract.
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When you're younger, you get shoved a lot. You don't really have a say-so.
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What's important is that my family and I are all good.
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I'm really excited that the fashion industry is evolving, doing a much better job at representation, with women of color, women of different shapes, sizes, and creeds. It's been a long time coming... There were issues of tokenism, issues of misrepresentation. I'm optimistic that I see the change, the conversation that these archetypes gotta go. We can be very political and have long weaves down to our asses.
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Any decision I make is based on myself, and the only person I have to give an explanation to is God.
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So over time, playing shows - after every show we would have pow-wow, I would have notes and we'd go over and we'd really restructure and re-do and now I feel really, really good about the show. But it's taken time.
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As an artist, everybody has the opportunity to celebrate and speak their truth.
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Style is the way we communicate who we are to people before we open our mouths.
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I've let go of being a super perfectionist on every single note and wanting the pitch to be absolutely perfect all of the time. I grew up watching the best of the best.
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I don't really have guilty pleasures. Anything musically that I fully, fully believe, is good no matter who the artist is, no matter what the marketing is behind it, I stand pretty firm.
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I have been writing songs since I was 9 years old, so writing has and always will be my first love and passion.
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I just feel so much joy and gratitude that people have connected to it in this way. The biggest reward that I could ever get is seeing women, especially black women, talk about what this album ['A Seat at the Table'] has done, the solace it has given them.
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A lot of times I use live musicians, but I don't want it to have that live funky sound so I'll just take the best loop of a drum part and repeat it over and over and over again so that there's consistency and it feels a little bit more programmed. But I have a love/hate relationship with comping as well.
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Women face a lot of challenges every day - we have to stand firm in our walk and our intentions - but there are times when that weight feels too heavy, feels like a load that I just can't bear that day. I try to work through that in my art, whatever medium that might be. My live performance is based around the color red, and all the things that communicates as a woman to the world - fiery, really vocal, present, almost a kind of stubborn color - and redefining it as being very complex. Being able to express that complexity, I'm getting a lot better at that the older I've gotten.
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I've also learned to only write songs and melodies that really work for my voice and that I won't have issues doing live. Because you can get really, really comfortable in the comping process: out of five takes, maybe one of those high notes that you struggled to do, nailed it, and then live you're having that challenge of really having to recreate that.
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I'm a fan of hip-hop and I love it, I by no means am an expert on it.
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I remember being really young and having this voice inside that told me to trust my gut. And my gut has been really, really strong in my life. It's pretty vocal and it leads me.
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I actually produced other people's vocals for a long time when I first signed my publishing deal and I had just sort of decided that I only wanted to be a writer. I would be in all of these writing sessions, and a lot of times my publisher would say, "You should get a demo singer to sing it because then it doesn't identify as a Solange song."
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I actually was a ballet dancer - I studied ballet from three until 13 - but like very seriously, that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a contemporary ballet dancer. I wanted to go to Juilliard.
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There's a lot of situations where I feel irony involved when R&B and hip-hop is expressed in the indie worlds. There's a lot of times when I feel like the juxtaposition becomes a thing.
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I actually love my natural hair when it's in a twist out and it's been slept on for five days and revived by the steam of the shower.
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Our mother always taught us to be in control of our voice and our bodies and our work, and she showed us that through her example. If she conjured up an idea, there was not one element of that idea that she was not going to have her hand in. She was not going to hand that over to someone. And I think it's been an interesting thing to navigate, especially watching you do the same in all aspects of your work: Society labels that a control freak, an obsessive woman, or someone who has an inability to trust her team or to empower other people to do the work, which is completely untrue.
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I have to learn how to say no a lot. Life is too short for anything else.
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There's just so, so many overlooked R&B artists and I think it's really about, again, being sensitive to whatever you're addressing culturally. I just always try to have a sensitivity to it and what that might make someone feel.
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I love when rappers have a off-beat, very abstract timing, and he certainly did.And any rapper who really approaches rapping with the art form of songwriting melodically - I know a bunch of rappers who actually go in before they write the lyrics and come up with the melody. And you can hear and feel that difference so much when that's the case.
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He [ the son]'s grown up listening to all types of music, and the natural form of rebellion is to find the one genre that maybe he hasn't listened to and to make that his thing.
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There were things that had been weighing heavy on me for quite some time. And I went into this hole, trying to work through some of these things so that I could be a better me and be a better mom to Julez and be a better wife and a better friend and a better sister.
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