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.

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.

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

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

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.

Going back and forth between Western Arabic and African countries clearly created the various musical backgrounds I could have and obviously influenced my professional attitude, my way of approaching both music composition and singing, particularly phrasing.