Top 66 Beth Hart Quotes

I don’t really see myself as a success. I just don’t look at it that way.

I really cherish my time at home. As you know, I love my husband so much, but he’s always doing everything for me out here to keep me rolling forward. But I don’t get to do near enough for him. So when I’m at home, I like to cook for him and do some gardening – all that wife-y kinda stuff, you know?

The only thing as a kid that really mattered to me was that I wouldn’t quit. When I say ‘quit,’ I mean you wake up, you go to the piano, you go to whatever instrument, and you work at learning how to tell the truth.

When I’m going through something really difficult, I think it’s what made me go to the piano for the first time when I was a child. I look at it as a place to pray.

If I’m writing the music, and I don’t feel like its really connecting inside, then I’ll know there’s no reason to really put a lyric on it; it’s a waste, and I’ll throw it.

Fame doesn’t matter; people approving of you doesn’t matter. And if it does matter, you’re in store for something very difficult and painful.

I wrote my first song when I was four, and I played it at my piano recital.

What I do is I really enjoy and appreciate the challenge of songwriting and singing and performing and just being really, really grateful at all times. Also, I have no fear or problems with saying no and setting boundaries, you know, with the label, with my management.

The transition from fan to performer to recording artist, for me, was like learning how to dive… and each board got higher and higher.

Leonard Cohen is probably the greatest lyricist for music that’s ever lived, you know?

The piano represents home to me. It represents a place where I can heal – the sound of it, the feel of it, the way it looks.

I worked with Mrs. Davis for four years, and then she realized, as the material started getting harder, that I had never learned to read. I was just listening as she’d play the song, and I’d play it back. When that happened, she got very upset and stopped being my teacher.

Meditation is really good. I do that a lot with my bass player Bob, and we do TM: transcendental meditation.

I think that’s always the hope – I mean, I can’t speak for others, but I think other artists, no matter what type of medium they are using – whether it be from painting to acting to dancing, songwriting, or anything like that – I believe the desire is to get to the truth, and I think it’s really hard to tell the truth.

I really love Dinah Washington and anything live from her – she had some of the greatest jazz musicians in the whole world, and sometimes she would be with a big band, and sometimes she’d just be on stage with a muted trumpet, upright bass, and a piano.

The audiences are really great. I really love it over there. I love Europe, period. Oh my God, all the architecture and all the history and just to the way people think and live is so different.

It’s really hard to do, but I think it’s an important thing for, no matter what type of artist you are, to trust that the reason why you are given the love of being artistic is just to make you happy – it’s not to make you rich and famous.

I don’t ever go and write music for an album. That’s not something I do. I don’t go and write music for an audience or a career; I don’t do that at all. I write basically all the time. I’m addicted to it.

On piano, I tend to write either gospel or singer-songwriter songs, sometimes kind of rocking blues songs. But the more heavier rock stuff I will write on bass.

I always kind of say to people, don’t believe the hype. You are never as good as what they say; you are never as bad, and remember that you do it just to make you happy and to enjoy it.

I’ve been in therapy since I was five, but music goes way, way, way, way, way beyond therapy.

Although I take the medication, which has made a huge impact on my life in a positive way, still, honestly, when I’m a bit sick is when I’m at my most creative.

If you’re going to go the way of ‘American Idol,’ then you better be able to do what you want musically, because just going for the fame will only keep you happy for so long.

If I’m in a good place, then I’m really open-minded to what’s being presented, but if I’m in a bad place, I’m much more closed-minded.

No matter where I go, I never write the setlist until I’m at the venue.

If I’m happy and joyous, which I have been a lot in my life, thankfully, I’m usually not at the piano writing about it.

It’s very important for me to do things like talk therapy. That’s where you begin to see the walls that your illness has put up as a way to protect yourself… but of course, those walls also keep us from getting to the truth of things.

I always try and be as positive as I can and give people the benefit of the doubt because, in my own experience – seeing myself fall so hard so many times in my life and do so many things where I lost my way so many times – and then people didn’t give up on me, like my husband and my family.

Sometimes when people ask a lot of me, or they’re not liking what I’m turning in, especially when I’m working one on one with someone, I can get really insecure.

I had so much anger and judgement towards myself for my work not being up to the standard that I expected it to be, so I wouldn’t allow myself to complete anything.

I like swimming or go to the gym, but I am alone a lot, and that can get a little depressing.

I think that, being on the road, you’ve got your family with you, so there’s no way that you can have a closer feeling to a group of people that you love than when you sit down and have a dinner or a lunch or a breakfast together.

My story is how to have a life while dealing with mental illness, and I’ve had a life. I’ve been blessed. It’s been a different kind of life than what I planned on, but it’s been a good life nonetheless.

We all have our ups and our downs, and it’s consistent throughout all of our lives. It’s not a movie: you don’t get to a point where, suddenly, you’re free forever – it’s life.

My personality is a personality where I get really, really nervous and doubtful about almost everything, which is always a work in progress to build up my confidence a little bit more.

My job is to work at song writing and singing and telling the truth in song writing. My job is to be courageous enough to go on stage and tell the truth, the same truth that’s gone into my song writing.

What I look at, success is about really being grateful. You wake up in the morning, and you’re thankful that you could breathe because it’s a beautiful planet we live on, and I know there is a lot of struggle and pain, but there is more joy.

If I love Etta James, it’s not just the voice, and it’s not just the song, but it’s the energy that connects me to her, so if she is strong, I can be strong, too, and if she is sad, I know I am not alone, or if she is joyous, I can connect with that joy.

I was very neurotic as a kid, but I also used to pray to God as a young kid in school. It was a form of meditation to slow my head down and not make me feel nervous.

As a kid, I hated home, and I just wanted so much to learn or do something that could take me away and keep me away forever. And then I got blessed to get to make music and meet people who wanted to work with me. And then, the next thing I knew, I was on the road, and I was gone.

I think that anytime that you can open your eyes and see all that you have and all that you’ve been blessed with, it’s the greatest way to connect you with God, just being grateful rather than always wanting more, wanting to be different, wanting to be better.

If I ever had to choose between having a good mind and good health with having big success, then there’s no contest: I’d put my health first every time.

‘St. Teresa’ is one of my favorites. It reminds me of the importance of grace.

When you hear me sit at the piano by myself and do one of those super-personal, confessional songs, that’s where my true voice is.

When you love the music that you’re going to play, of course you’re going to do your best.

For any performer who’s coming up, if they really want to test their psychology and how they handle themselves on stage, then coming to the U.K. as a whole is a wonderful place for that.

I always feel like you never know: sometimes you can put out work that you feel is really strong, and other times, you can put out work you think is less strong, and people react to it, so it’s kinda like in the eye of the beholder!

Sometimes, the songs that really affected me were not from the artist catalogue of their music, like the song ‘Thunder Road’ by Bruce Springsteen. I never got into any of his other music, but that song, to this day, is in my top three lyrical masterpieces of all time.

I’m such an emotional performer, and my head is always like a rollercoaster, so if I’m in a good place and feeling grateful, that’s when I notice that my shows come across as a lot more positive.

I love getting to have different food and getting to be around different people and different cultures and different ways people look at life. It’s really kind of helped me open up my mind and see the world from different perspectives.

I’m writing all the time when I’m at home. When I’m on the road, I just get ideas, and I put it on my iPhone.

I learned about forgiveness, and I’ve reached out to others to make amends.

I ran away at 15 to chase a guy that I met who would become my boyfriend, and he was living in L.A.

I’m not a doctor, but I would assume that anything that you’re doing that’s harming you, and you can’t stop doing it, is a sign of mental illness.

I’m a Bipolar 1, Rapid Cycler. So really easily, if I’m around people that are sick and are not medicated, and there’s a lot of people going to AA that should be medicated that are really, truly mentally ill, then I end up being triggered.

When I was a little girl, my family was extremely close, loving and really happy, and then overnight, things just became a nightmare, and instead of them becoming a nightmare and getting better, they became a nightmare and just kept getting worse.

,what saved my life was my husband. He nursed me back to health, and he continues to do that to this day. It’s not easy to be married and to have a relationship with someone with mental illness.

I got into cello in the fourth grade, and I played that for years. I adored playing it. I got an opera coach when I was 12 because I really wanted to learn how to sing properly. The only proper way to sing, I thought at that age, was opera.

At first, I was using my sister Susan’s lyrics, as I could not write myself, only the music. And then one day, she and I had a fight, and she threatened to take away the lyrics from all the songs that I put the lyrics to, so it was that day that I began writing my first lyric to the music.

I guess it’s about getting older. I know that I’m going to lose people that I love – I’m going to die myself – so everything seems to be getting somehow sweet and more important and more special and more humbling and more challenging and more terrifying all at the same time.

I love ‘Fire On The Floor.’ It’s just smouldering. I think it’s gonna be a fantastic piece to perform live. It’s filled with passion. It’s about when someone you know is so bad for you, but you can’t help it.

I have no idea what was the first record I ever bought, but I think I asked my mom to buy me… um… a collection of Beethoven when I was a little girl because I became very addicted to his music. It might have been piano sonatas.

I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t care what people think, but I would rather have less people who like or approve of me for who I really am than a bunch more people who like or approve me for what I’m not.

I cook stuff that I picked up from my husband’s mother. I thought that would be a good way to his heart, you know. I love to cook Italian and French, also.

Etta James takes credit for writing some of the lyrics on ‘I’d Rather Go Blind,’ which I think are some of the most phenomenal lyrics I’ve ever heard. There’s arguments now about who wrote it, but she always takes credit for it in her live performances.

To me, I don’t care if I co-write or if I write alone. If it’s a great song and it makes it to the record, then that’s what is supposed to come, you know what I mean.