I am not a jazz singer. I wouldn’t place myself on that footing. I wouldn’t even enter that arena.

I’m not a jazz singer.

My earliest influences were things I heard in my household.

The short answer is, yes, I think I have become a better singer.

My first love was the sound of guitar.

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.

I was a guitar player first off.

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.

I really just followed my musical instincts every step of my life.

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.

I feel fortunate that I was able to step away from it when I wasn’t interested.

There is not a lot that keeps me glued to the radio as I used to be.

As far as other instrumentalists, I used to love mellow sax players like Paul Desmond. I love piano.

My songwriting and my style became more complex as I listened, learned, borrowed and stole and put my music together.

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.

This is a cause that musicians can take to heart because one of our main reasons for being is to share our music with other people, and this takes us to people who probably wouldn’t otherwise get to hear music on quite this level.

My parents were music lovers and collectors. It was around.

I love working with the quartet. I have more freedom and flexibility.

I would say that I’m finding my voice in more ways than one.

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.

A lot of what I have always done is do other singers.

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.

There’s a whole lot of songs that men just can’t do. The words are from another time and represent too much of an emotional commitment, whereas women can say that because of who they are.

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.

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.

I am not a jazz singer. I wouldn’t place myself on that footing. I wouldn’t even enter that arena.

I’m easily distracted by other things in the world around me.

I love all kinds of music.