Matana Roberts Quotes

I love making people sing. I love group singing, sacred harp singing, choral singing, recordings of people singing sea shanties, work songs, prison songs - how people just sang to get through things.

When you read enough stories about people who have been through different levels of trauma, and it doesn't matter what the history is, trauma is trauma, there's always this freeing of the spirit.

New York is beautiful, but [the South] makes it look like a wasteland.

I have a really big interest in the spirit world: spooks and the things we can't necessarily see but feel.

Someone can do anything they want to you on the outside, but whatever they do to me they cannot destroy what's on my inside. Mentally that cannot be taken away from me, no matter what someone does.

A lot of my video work is super lo-fi on purpose. I'm not trying to become technically super proficient. The only thing I'm interested in becoming technically proficient on is my alto saxophone.

I'm a history geek and I love American history. It's so bizarre and so problematic and I love the many conundrums that it represents. You can go down so many black holes.

Leading a band is fun, but it's not always something I want to continually focus on. I have my toes in a lot of different things.