If you write songs and if you write music that's very sincere and very honest, it's pop music, but it is pop music with a lot of honesty and a lot of heart.

I was a teacher for a long time. I taught at a community college: voice, theory, humanities. And nowadays, music education is a dying thing. Funding is being cut more and more and more.

I might be a Cuban American, but I'm also an Afro-Cuban American.

I'm a big believer in education, period.

A real active music set, based and really concentrated on what the music's all about. That's what I'm all about - singing and a really good strong music set.

It happened in Miami, in Coral Gables, a great big ol' Cuban wedding. It was pretty intense.

If there was any other place I would live, other than Miami, it would be California. It's beautiful. The weather is just gorgeous, I love being here, too.

I have a bachelor's and a master's in jazz.

I write in English first, and then I translate to Spanish. I've always felt more comfortable with the English side of things first.

So, when I got the contract for my album, even though it was an English record, my manager insisted on making sure we would record in Spanish as well, and it worked out really well for me.

Even before I became a recording artist, I did other things in music. I was a teacher, I did studio work, and I was an arranger and a producer.

Sometimes, as we're stumbling along in the dark, we hit something good.

Soul is a constant. It's cultural. It's always going to be there, in different flavors and degrees.

I always loved bluegrass, but there was so much I didn't know about American country music in respect to the origins of this country. It was interesting to see the evolution of it.

Major cities are divided into two parts; the bits that are in the guidebook and the bits that aren't. If you don't take a guidebook, you'll see a different city.

If the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eaton, the Japanese bases in the Pacific were captured on the beaches of the Caribbean.

The sense of truth no matter how subjective is necessary for the experience of beauty.

The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go to weep in common.

Thou shalt not whine' should be the eleventh commandment.

You can never advance the ball on defense.

I held a variety of jobs - most notably ten years working in universities - and kept on writing.