What does music mean to me? I don't think I would really be much without it, without it coming through me. It's my means of communication, my means of growth, my means of transportation from one point in my life to another.
What I work hard at doing is staying on a path of being kind and showing and proving that I'm a good person to society. That's hard. The talent, that's a gift. I just came here like that.
What makes me furious, not just because we're in an interview, but I don't like when writers take your words and put them somewhere else, in the wrong context in their own article about you.
Music and the music business are two different things.
I grew up listening to old soul.
Anything that had to do with art I been doing all my life. It was a gift. It's nothing I work real hard at doing.
As Erykah Badu, it has nothing to do with me, the way I look, my hair wrap, my style, it's about you and what you feel for my music. If I can make you feel like the way that people who influenced me made me feel, that's completion.
But now I realize that this record business really needs me. No one else is trying to take a chance or do something different.
From then on, I realized this is what I want to do, what I'm supposed to do: Giving energy and receiving it back through applause. I love it. That's my world. I love it. I enjoy it. I live for it.
Hopefully my music is medicine, some type of antidote for something or some kind of explanation or just to feel good.
I am not systematic at all when it comes to religion. I just love life. And I'm not judgmental. And I'm a vegetarian.
I believed in myself, and I've always worked very, very hard as an artist, and I am an artist in every sense of the word.
I think a lot of people have lost respect for the individual, you know, the individual, the person who doesn't conform.
I don't feel like I need to preach to the world or nothing like that. I just feel like I share what I say, and if listeners get it, they get it. And I never underestimate the audience's ability to feel me.
I started performing at two or three on a tape recorder, one of those little flat recorders where you just push play and record.