Women Guitarists

"We are 12 billion light-years from the edge. That's a guess — no-one can ever say it's true, but I know that I will always be with you."

"Because the line between, Wrong and right, Is the width of a thread, From a spider's web. The piano keys are black and white, But they sound like a million colours in your mind."

"I've got a ticket, To the fast city, Where the bells don't really ring, Getting off the plane the cold air, Rushes like bullets through my brain, And I'm divided between penguins and cats, But it's not about what animal you've got, It's about being able to fly, It's about dying nine times."

"[Melua] makes music that's easy on the ear and even easier on the brain. She's the perfect good girl in the middle of the road. I'm not keen to make things too easy for anyone."

"The only trouble is that there's absolutely no passion, no soul and no excitement to be found here...Yet all good music should provoke some sort of emotion, and this [Nine Million Bicycles] provokes none whatsoever."

"I'm a songwriter but she [Melua] has her songs written for her... She must think it's her fucking lucky day... It's not like she's singing old songs like Jamie [Cullum], she's singing shit new songs that her manager writes for her."

"She enjoys extremes, but in life her emotions are always in check."

"She is one of the most intelligent singers I've worked with for a very long time, - there are little reminders in her voice, of all sorts of other singers like Eartha Kitt and Edith Piaf, - of whom she has never heard. She exudes a modest confidence, she is completely sure of herself and has a maturity far in advance of her age."

"I just think war is fucked up"

"Earth is my home!"

"Wanking housewives"

"I've never had paparazzi follow me and I rarely get recognised. I dress like a tramp when I'm not working. My hairdresser calls me the Romanian window cleaner. That's just the way I am."

"Don't come into the music industry. It's almost inevitable that you'll psychologically be quite screwed up. Fame isn't a natural, human, behavioural thing. You get alienated. You're not really surrounded by truth."

"The last verse [In My Secret Life] completely got to me, about how we all have great ideals but in reality we end up conforming, following everyone else. We want to be stronger so we lead that life inside, thinking of ourselves as these great brave souls. I literally thought when I was 15 that I was a musical genius and I could change the world, but in fact you're not and you can't and you don't, and that realisation is almost heartbreaking."

"...after all we don't want the radio star to kill video."

"Some people think it's got a double meaning, but as my mum's in the audience tonight, it doesn't."

"I don't think I could see myself with someone who's famous. I don't like the lifestyle and everything it stands for. Too superficial. That attention is too much. For me to go home and be surrounded by that sounds like a fucking nightmare. But a musician or someone who's into music is different."

"Buying books is probably my biggest vice when I travel. I bought a great one in America called An Incomplete Education, which covers everything from fashion to philosophy in quite a humorous way. It’s a bluffer’s guide, but pretty extensive. Because I never went to university, it’s my attempt to bone up on subjects I don’t know much about."

"I spend eight to nine months working abroad and cram in a holiday when I have the odd week off. This year, three of those months were spent in America playing gigs with my band, so we got to visit all kinds of places from Arizona to New York. After a few weeks, I really began to miss family and friends not to mention baked beans!"

"Promo? It's a fucking nightmare!"

"Of course [Kate Bush] is still relevant. I wasn't actually in the country when her music first came out, so I only discovered it three or four years ago. What's amazing is that something like "Wuthering Heights" still sounds so different. I actually saw her about nine months ago, we were just passing at an industry event and I went up to her and said I was a big fan and asked her about the new record. She was really excited about it but quite nervous because she felt that everyone was hyping it up a bit and she just wanted to bring out an album. You know, she's a musician."

"I think I am easy to make fun of. I try not to pay too much attention. You can't let critics dictate what you do... The thing that fascinates me, is the emotion in music, the way it can make me cry or laugh or be angry. I'm not trying to be hip or cool, and I'm not scared to put everything I have into songs. Passion is the greatest thing that music can evoke. We live in a society where I think people often find it hard to express themselves, but sometimes a song can do that for you. It might not be groundbreaking, but there is something about the simplicity of presenting songs where it's all about the lyric and the melody. People don't need to get through a whole lot of production to get to the root of the song. It's just music doing what music does best... A lot of things in the mainstream are repetitive and soulless and have been churned out without any real conviction. It is really unfair to call Coldplay insufferable, when they obviously care about what they do. James [Blunt] too. Too much of the music industry is controlled by lawyers and businessmen, making music like it's a product on the factory line. That's what I call insufferable."

"I do know that there are some things that exist in this world that you just can't prove. That could be the case with God or whoever might be up there, but I don't follow any one religion."

"As a family, we have been very fortunate to find a happy lifestyle in this country and we feel we belong. We still consider ourselves to be Georgian, because that is where our roots are, and I return to Georgia every year to see my uncles and grandparents, but I am proud to now be a British citizen."

"Dancing is an important function of music, but so is crying."

"When I was 14 or 15 I was into the whole Spice Girls and I was a huge fan, but two years ago I heard The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and I was like - fucking hell, I've been born in the wrong bloody decade!"

"A fucking good tune"

"It's so funny because when you do smoke weed and write a song, you're like, 'Yeah, this is brilliant, this is excellent!' - and the next morning you go back and often find that really it's not very good at all... I've never done anything like acid or cocaine and I hope I don't. But I guess you have to try things once in a while... just once. I think you have to be very wary of falling into that trap of getting addicted."

"წითელი ღვინო, სტალინი, შევარდნაძე, ქეთი მელუა."

"I think acting is something that I want to make sure that, if I do make that transition, I want to make sure that it's really dramatic, and put my energy into acting, you know, fully instead of trying to balance a whole lot of things at once, 'cause I really don't want to become one of those singer-trying-to-be-actor-but-didn't-really-work kind of thing."

"Was Ashlee Simpson nice to me? Yes. She said "hi" very clearly in a nice voice!"

"Performing, for me, is like oxygen. Performing, for me, is like the only thing that is a constant in my life, because you're in all different places doing all different things, but when I get up on stage, that's where I know exactly what to do, that's where I own it."

"To me, song writing is so therapeutic, it's just part of my life and I can't go through the day without having some kind of song idea pop into my head where I have to write Sharpie all over my arm trying to remember the song idea.""

"I co-wrote all the songs on my album, and co-produced a lot of them as well, So being involved in the creative aspect and not just singing is so important to me because, above everything, I love to create and I love to express myself.""

"I like being very loud and noisy, as the title of my album says."

"If things blow up then that's awesome and if things don't, I still can live a normal life and be able to go to the grocery store without people following me."

"Our bios are sort of similar, but guys in rock bands all wear T-shirts and jeans and nobody ever says they're all the same."

"We caught a lot of people off guard, which is cool. And I think we made things more enjoyable for the boyfriends who had been dragged to the concert."

"I don't know, it's not like I was thinking about it being my trademark or whatever it is. I mean I don't think I'll get it removed or anything. But, I don't know - it's part of me, I'm used to it."

"Being vegetarian was to inform everything, the course of my destiny. I was baffled that the entire hippie nation hadn't become vegetarian en masse. It made no sense as eating meat went against the whole dialogue. Were the hippies just as hypocritical as the rest of them? I couldn't admit that but I understood why I loved songs like “The Loner” so much. I didn't want to be like the majority anyway. The majority were always wrong."

"Everything in nature lives according to some order so it seems unlikely that humans live outside this system, even if they try to resist their instincts. That's how we can be sure we're not animals, this refusal to abide by what we know is good for us. If an animal's instinct tells him to avoid something he has no trouble keeping a wide berth. We, on the other hand, run in the direction of danger if it offers a thrill or satisfies a curiosity."

"Chons, on rhythm guitar, had long black hair and blue eyes and was the first person I ever met who said she never ate meat, and when she told me that, I never ate it again either. Best thing that ever happened to me. All it took was the mere suggestion. Nobody else was vegetarian that I knew of, but I started to think of meat-eating as a very weird practice and secretly regarded meat-eaters with distaste, almost contempt. Why would anyone kill an animal if they didn’t need to? I learned to live and associate with “the majority,” but never respected them. I got used to having this lack of regard for 97 percent of the population."

"There's a crowd of people harbored in every person, there are so many roles that we play. And you've decided to love me for eternity. I'm still deciding who I want to be today""

"I fight with love, and I laugh with rage. You've gotta live light enough to see the humor, And long enough to see some change."

"Life is a b movie. It's stupid and it's strange, A directionless story, And the dialogue is lame. But in the he said, she said, Sometimes there's some poetry, If you turn your back long enough, And let it happen naturally."

"They put you in your place, and they tell you to behave But no one can be free until we're all on even grade."

"Freedom and democracy, That's the word from Washington every day. Put America to sleep with warm milk and clichés, And people are expendable along the way."

"I was blessed with a birth and a death, and I guess I just want some say in-between."

"We discovered we are both pleasantly furious half of the time, When we're not just toeing the line."

"Let's grow old and die together. Let's do it now."