“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“When you love the music that you’re going to play, of course you’re going to do your best.”
― Beth Hart
“Each night, we try something new, play different songs, see what works, what goes down well, mix it up a bit until we find the right mix.”
― Beth Hart
“Before I was on medication, the mania was so bad that I couldn’t concentrate, so although I’d feel very creative, I could never really finish a piece of work because my mind was moving so fast.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“So it’s a majorly important thing for young artists, as well as older artists like myself, to know that not only do we have the right to say no, but if we don’t say no, we’re gonna die.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“’I’d Rather Go Blind’ was a song I did on an album with Joe Bonamassa called ‘Don’t Explain,’ and I’ve always been such a huge, huge Etta James fan.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“I’d been trying to do this since I was 15, sending out the demo tapes and doing all the things that everyone told me that I should be doing. But no deal – like, never.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“I learned about forgiveness, and I’ve reached out to others to make amends.”
― Beth Hart
“I don’t really see myself as a success. I just don’t look at it that way.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“I like swimming or go to the gym, but I am alone a lot, and that can get a little depressing.”
― Beth Hart
“Meditation is really good. I do that a lot with my bass player Bob, and we do TM: transcendental meditation.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“I love being an American, and it’s a beautiful country, but we are a bunch of whack jobs. We have got so much to learn.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“Usually, I use writing as a way to figure out things about me, and I get scared pretty easily about everything. I deal with a lot of depression, so I usually use it as way to find some relief from that.”
― Beth Hart
“I ran away at 15 to chase a guy that I met who would become my boyfriend, and he was living in L.A.”
― Beth Hart
“So many people that I’ve wanted to work with have died. I was so crazy in love with Amy Winehouse. When she died, I felt like I lost my sister all over again. I couldn’t stop crying for weeks and weeks! It was horrible! She was so wonderful and so talented.”
― Beth Hart
“’Better Than Home,’ the song, is about getting out of your hiding place and having the courage to live as loud as possible. It is about feeling the life that has been given and has been waiting for you all along.”
― Beth Hart
“’St. Teresa’ is one of my favorites. It reminds me of the importance of grace.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“The transition from fan to performer to recording artist, for me, was like learning how to dive… and each board got higher and higher.”
― Beth Hart
“No matter where I go, I never write the setlist until I’m at the venue.”
― Beth Hart
“If I don’t relate to a song, I won’t sing it. The thing is that if I wrote it, I’m always going to relate to it.”
― Beth Hart
“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?”
― Beth Hart
“With songs, it doesn’t matter what song it is; every time I go out and perform it, it’s like the first time I’m performing it, the first time I wrote it. If it’s not, then I’m not going to do it that night.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“There’s stigmas attached to anything that makes you, in the public’s eye, seem weak. So of course, you know, you’re in a business where your image, and the way people perceive you, you are taught, is important.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“That would be something I would stress the most to any artist – is, number one, don’t ever allow, you know, success or whatever you want to call it to determine your worth as an artist or as a person. That’s number one. And number two, do it because you love it.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“I was never really into any kind of hard-core religious structure or dogma.”
― Beth Hart
“I never want to hear about going to hell if I did something wrong. But I do use Jesus as my curve point, and I think of his teachings when it comes to how I want to treat people.”
― Beth Hart
“I wasn’t really raised in a religious family.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“I tend to have a lot of songs ready for each record I do anyway. I always have. I was thinking, the more you write, the better chance you’re going to come up with a collection of stuff that is going to work together.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“,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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“I should be writing songs about happiness all day long, but a lot of my songs get inspired from that place of unworthiness and shame, which really goes with mental illness.”
― Beth Hart
“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!”
― Beth Hart
“I always think that you should never, ever force a producer to do something with a song that they don’t think they can do something fantastic with, I think it’s a stupid idea to force it, even if you think it’s your best song.”
― Beth Hart
“I’ve been in therapy since I was five, but music goes way, way, way, way, way beyond therapy.”
― Beth Hart
“If you work hard at something, you’re going to find a way that you can live in this life, no matter what your handicaps are.”
― Beth Hart
“I know what makes me connect to my music – it is knowing that I am not alone in my feelings and my thoughts.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“There is something about live albums that I enjoy so much more than studio albums from all of my favorite artists. When I am listening to them live, I get to connect so much more to their truth than in studio albums.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“That’s the great thing about social media: you can make one move, and everybody knows about it, and I kind of like that.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“I don’t think that Americans are ungrateful, not at all. But I do think that we are a young country, and we have a lot to learn.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“Leonard Cohen is probably the greatest lyricist for music that’s ever lived, you know?”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“One of the beautiful things about music is it gives you an opportunity to learn how to tell the truth, and it’s a life-long learning process.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“I wrote my first song when I was four, and I played it at my piano recital.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“Once I finish something, if I don’t feel that it’s absolutely fabulous, there’s no way I would ever let it be recorded, I wouldn’t even present it to a producer.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“The thing is, I’m not really a great pianist at all. But if God said I could either sing or play piano, and which would it be? I would definitely choose the piano.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
“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.”
― Beth Hart
Leave a Reply