Melody Gardot

“My mother dropped a dish on the floor one day and the sound made me collapse.”

“Alber Elbaz really understands the female body and his designs are so flattering to the female form.”

“History is a part of everyone's life. I highly doubt Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder woke up every day remembering first they were blind. Life is what it is.”

“I'm passionate about my eco jewellery made by friends in Brazil and other sentimental items that I mix with beautifully designed pieces.”

“Hey, the world is my home! And it's not scary - it's beautiful, liberating and enchanting, and you live moments out of a storybook because there's nothing to hold you back.”

“I went to the school of hard knocks. I don't mess around.”

“I listen to anything that has groove and soul but most of the music that I like is by people who are dead or dying.”

“Honesty, irony and small children make me laugh.”

“I don't drive so well. So instead of collecting cars, you could say I collect shoes.”

“I remember first standing up to hold a guitar on stage being an accomplishment.”

“It's just incredible to be working alongside with the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, sharing the story of his life.”

“Before, I was living in Philadelphia and thinking and speaking of things I had experienced in one environment alone. After leaving, I started to feel like I didn't have one home, but that my home was all around the world in these different kinds of music I had discovered.”

“To be honest with you, being on stage and performing is the 30, 40, 50 minutes of the most pleasurable experience that I have. Because it's during that time that I don't really feel any pain.”

“I decided that I'd rather be healthy and have pain than have my body shutting down.”

“One of the problems of people who live with pain is that they spend the whole day thinking about it, and it's exasperating. But even when I am having a bad moment and I can't get myself together, I get on stage and for an hour or two the pain becomes super-small.”

“I've never aspired to make 'jazz music,' I simply aspired to make music that was in a word, self-soothing and relevant to the resonating sounds I was hearing somewhere tucked in the back of my mind.”

“In school I had piano lessons as a child for about two years.”

“There's something that human beings understand inherently about simplicity in design.”

“When I auditioned for a choir at school I didn't get in.”

“My songs are based on life.”