Rokia Traore Quotes

We need self-confidence in our ability to build Africa. I trust in Mali and I trust in music.

The most important thing is to be happy myself with what I am doing.

Without an audience, all your dreams will not come true at all, because you need an audience to write new songs and continue to do music.

At the beginning of the tour, I arrange the live show exactly like the album, but of course from one audience to another, from one venue to another, it can become longer.

The audiences are really different in general. Even in the same country or in the same city, from one venue to another, the audiences can be totally different.

I'm in a state of my life when the essential is very important to me. I don't like long songs with complicated arrangements and breaks anymore.

I prefer simple things - monotone melodies repeating the same things all the time. Because I think life is like that.

We're repeating the same things all the time; there aren't many new things happening in this life.

I don't know if it's due to my age, that I'm older now, [but] I love the essentials. I don't like the things around us that are a kind of mirage.

Of course the folk guitar is the one I play very often, but I wanted a more electric sound.

I wanted to come back to the guitar after three albums and almost 10 years. I started to miss this instrument and I wanted to come back to the guitar.

Traveling changed my personality and gave me ability to do the music I do and to think in a certain way that everything can be possible.

My father was not able to get all the vinyl he used to listen to with me. He couldn't travel as he did it because of his profession as a diplomatic career.

I used to play guitar for myself and write lyrics and listen to different styles of music.

I don't think I'm unique or that I'm trying to do something unique, but I feel it is something I would like to hear. This kind of music I would like to listen to but I can't hear very often.

For me, each time I'm on stage, each time I'm working on a new album, it's like a dream. I can't believe it's happening.

Of course I am stressed after I finish working on an album about what an audience will think, if it will be successful or not.

An artist who doesn't have any audience is not an artist.

I've been in contact with music since I was four or five years old through my father, because of the interest he had in music and all his musical skills. I finally managed to make that my profession.

American audiences don't react in the same way as European ones to African music because, I think, Europeans listen to this music through all the festivals that exist here.

You can be a star here in Europe and not be known at all in the United States.

When you have a chance to be an artist with an audience in your lifetime, you have to say thanks to your audience. That's a great thing. That's the best thing that can happen to an artist.

Sometimes there are painters or very famous artists who start to become artists after they are dead because an audience or a public know about their art after they die.

When you are able to make a living with your job as an artist, that means you have an audience and you have to thank this audience.

The interesting thing for me is to put together all my influences and all my experiences I got through my traveling with my father.

It's a great experience just to understand that finally being well known is not the most important thing.

There are some things around us that are not actually useful. I didn't know that before. It's very new for me to understand. That became my way of writing: I can see also the new myself.

You just have to try before thinking that you can't.