“Cheap music, childish images, the vulgate in language, in its crassest sense, can penetrate to the deeps of our necessities and dreams. It can assert irrevocable tenure there. The opening bars, the hammer-beat accelerando of Edith Piaf's Je ne regrette rien — the text is infantile, the tune stentorian, and the politics which enlisted the song unattractive — tempt every nerve in me, touch the bone with a cold burn and draw me into God knows what infidelities to reason, each time I hear the song, and hear it, uncalled for, recurrent inside me.”

“I can hear her heart beat from a thousand miles
And the heavens open every time she smiles
And when I come to her that's where I belong
Yet I'm running to her like a river's song.”

“I'm glad I can be comfortable as an African and singing my YouTube language when I drop songs, I drop beat songs.”

“You think I'm not a goddess?
Try me.
This is a torch song.
Touch me and you'll burn.”

“It sounds silly I know. But for me, the power of music rests in its ability to reach inside and touch the places where the deepest cuts lie. Like a benevolent god, a good song will never let you down.”

“…I engage with poetry musically. I think I hear the music of the poem before I put words to it. The poem comes to me as it were a song more than a string of words or images. If I can’t transport that musical quality to the poem, then the poem doesn’t exist for me…”

“Are we biology or God or something higher? I know my heart beats and I listen to it. The beat is biology, but what is the song?”

“Just have a listen to my songs. If you still want to beat me up, you can.”

“I heard your song the moment we were born. And years later, it dragged me back from the lake of the half-dead when all I wanted to do was die. Each time someone tried to kill me, it sang its tune and gave me hope.”

“I touch God in my song
as the hill touched the far-away sea
with its waterfall.”