The biggest influence? I've had several at different times - but the biggest for me was Bob Dylan, who was a guy that came along when I was twelve or thirteen and just changed all the rules about what it meant to write songs.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I have been influenced by many different artists at many different stages of my life. Starting out, it was people like Elton John, Billy Joel, Ben Folds, and Fiona Apple. As I got older I got deeper into the work of bands like the Beatles, artists like Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Etta James, and Joni Mitchell.
My songwriting is so influenced by orchestrated music, dramatic, super glam rock-y stuff. Two of my biggest influences in songwriting were Elton John and Freddie Mercury.
My earliest influence was Quincy Jones. I thought 'The Wiz' soundtrack was the most amazing thing I'd ever heard. It was my first record and you had Michael Jackson, Ted Ross, Nipsey Russell and Diana Ross on it. I even took it to show and tell in third grade!
I was pretty strict in high school about who I would listen to. Musicians like Neil Young, Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell... who were, in my opinion, great writers. The music mattered, but it held hands with the lyrics, and the personality was, overall, unsullied.
Music was very influential on me as a kid.
As a songwriter, oddly enough, my influences were people like Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground, and Buddy Holly. Some psychedelic stuff, too.
Leonard Bernstein was probably the most significant formative influence on me - he was such an encompassing musician. I spent my teenage years absorbing him, and my other interests stemmed off of that. Bernstein led me to Sondheim and to Gershwin, and Sondheim led me to listening to Joni Mitchell.
The biggest musical influence on me was my mum. We were both enraptured by music.
Growing up, I was inspired by The Beatles and Bob Dylan. Damian Rice was a huge influence for me musically.
When I try to explain to people the big influences in my life, or at least when I first started, the most important ones were my friends who were also writing songs and were typically four or five years older than me.