I grew up listening to a lot of soul music, which has probably informed the way that I sing on my tracks.
I stumbled into soul music at a very young age. It had something that really spoke to me.
People keep putting limitations on themselves and creating this reality that soul music is dead. That's only in their reality. It's not true. To me, Adele is R&B. Bruno Mars is R&B. It's just good songwriting and songs. That is going to last.
Good soul music should make you feel something in your heart, in your body, and in your spirit. That's what I try to do both in the studio and on stage.
When I was a kid in the mid-'60s, I was what's known as a moddie boy, a prototype skinhead. You all had your hair like a crew cut, cropped, with suits or Levis with red suspenders, sometimes Doc Martens. It was a thriving soul music, Motown and ska scene; we used to dance to Prince Buster and the Skatalites.
I started to work up in my old bedroom, playing, writing songs, and it somehow came to me that I could introduce soul music. Nobody seemed to be doing that.
When someone is themselves through their music, it's soul music. James Taylor is soul music to me 'cause it's just him talking about him. It doesn't have anything to do with black or growing up in the church; it's where it comes from. It's just soul music.
We're Midwestern guys who grew up listening to soul music.
When I was little, I was listening to the Beatles, Bob Marley, Janis Joplin, and stuff. I had a big soul music culture, and not so much a French one.
I think that American music, for me, it's a synthesis of a lot of different things. But for me growing up in North Carolina, the stuff that I was listening to, the things that I was hearing, it was all about black music, about soul music.
