Quotes by Musicians - Page 46

If you would dance, my pretty Count, I'll play the tune on my little guitar..
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
There is a reason you glance up when you first hear a melody, or tap your foot to the sound of a drum. All humans are musical. Why else would the Lord give you a beating heart?
Mitch Albom
Music felt married to place, and the notion of "somewhere" predated the Internet's seeming invention of "everywhere" (which often ends up feeling like "nowhere").
Carrie Brownstein
First you learn the instrument, then you learn the music, then you forget all that s**t and just play.
Charlie Parker
I could turn up the volume on their songs and that loudness matched all my panic and fear, anger and emotions that seemed up until that point to be uncontrollable, even amorphous.
Carrie Brownstein
While my body might say, "I'm small and vulnerable," my hair warns, "DON'T MESS WITH ME.
Lindsey Stirling
There’s a little tagline in there that I throw out to our fans, I like to call them my sinners, and I’m a fellow sinner, and so I think that’s a special little throw-out to them.
brendon urie
The actual things behind the stories and behind the lyrics had a lot to do with…I hate saying depression, but there was a really rough patch in my head and really difficult time and I didn’t know why…A lot of the ghosts that appeared in the record is a metaphor for that depression at that time in my head and all the things going on in it. It’s mainly about that, and there’s little things here and there about certain people.
Lynn Gunn
She poured her heart into the song and filled it with everything she felt
Andrew Peterson
Kids don't care about rock and roll as much as they used to, as the other generations have. It's already turned into nothing but a fashion statement and an identity for kids to use as a tool for them to fuck and have a social life.
Kurt Cobain
what the fuck
Luke Hemmings
Jazz is the assassination, the murdering, the slaying of syncopation. I would even go so far as to confess that we are musical anarchists.
Nick La Rocca
When there is nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.
Torquil Campbell
I am a man ruled by music- I live, die, fight and survive for it.
Corey Taylor
The resulting amalgam - an exotic mixture of European, Caribbean, African, and American elements - made Louisiana into perhaps the most seething ethnic melting pot that the nineteenth century world could produce. This cultural gumbo would serve as breeding ground for many of the great hybrid musics of modern times; not just jazz, but also cajun, zydeco, blues, and other new styles flourished as a result of this laissez-faire environment. In this warm, moist atmosphere, sharp delineations between cultures gradually softened and ultimately disappeared.
Ted Gioia
Sometimes it's to your advantage for people to think you're crazy.
Thelonious Sphere Monk
That's one of the greatest things about music. You can sing a song to 85,000 people and they'll sing it back for 85,000 different reasons.
Dave Grohl
Back then, I was still just a fan of music. And to be a fan of music also meant to be a fan of cities, of places. Regionalism—and the creative scenes therein—played an important role in the identification and contextualization of a sound or aesthetic. Music felt married to place, and the notion of “somewhere” predated the Internet’s seeming invention of “everywhere” (which often ends up feeling like “nowhere”)
Carrie Brownstein
All the music I write is a search for myself.
Bruce Hornsby
The mixtapes we made for ourselves were musical mirrors. The sadness, anger, or frustration you might be feeling at a given time could be encapsulated in the song selection. You made mixtapes that corresponded to emotional states, and they'd be avaliable to pop into the deck when each feeling needed reinforcing or soothing. The mixtape was your friend, your psychiatrist, and your solace.
David Byrne
The online music magazine Pitchfork once wrote that I would collaborate with anyone for a bag of Doritos.
David Byrne
Music written by teams makes the authorship of a piece indistinct. Could it be that when hearing a song written by a team, a listener can sense that they aren't hearing an expression of a solitary individual's pain or joy, but that of a virtual conjoined person? Can we tell that an individual singer might actually represent a collective, that he might have multiple identities? Does that make the sentiments expressed more poetically universal? Dan eliminating some portion of the authorial voice make a piece of music more accessible and the singer more empathetic?
David Byrne
Any kid will tell you that, yes, their music is both an escape and a survival mechanism, and that sometimes the music givesbthem hope and inspiration. It doesn't just placate and pacify.
David Byrne
If tears were liquor, I'd have drunk myself sick.
Mark Lanegan
I [Music] was born in the open air, in the breaks of waves and the whistling of sandstorms, the hoots of owls and the cackles of tui birds. I travel in echoes. I ride the breeze. I was forged in nature, rugged and raw. Only man shapes my edges to make me beautiful. [Chapter 2]
Mitch Albom
Never look down unless you're helping them up.
Calum Hood
Just keeping being you. Don't worry what people think. Being you is cool, okay?
Ashton Irwin
Normal is gross
Jack Barakat
I've only got forever and forever is fine
Ashton Irwin
You might say that the universe plays the blues.
David Byrne
Presuming that there is such a thing as "progress" when it comes to music, and that music is "better" now than it used to be, is typical of the high self-regard of those who live in the present. It is a myth. Creativity doesn't "improve.
David Byrne
In the early days, I might have gotten on stage and begun to sing as a desperate attempt to communicate, but now I found that singing was both a physical and emotional joy. It was sensuous, a pure pleasure, which didn't take away from the emotions being expressed—even if they were melancholic. Music can do that; you can enjoy singing about something sad.
David Byrne
Recordings aren't time sensitive. You can hear the music you want whether it's morning, noon, or the middle of the night. You can "get into" clubs virtually, "sit" in concert halls you can't afford to visit, go to places that are too far away, or hear people sing about things you don't understand, about lives that are alien, sad, or wonderful. Recorded music can be ripped free from its context, for better and worse. It becomes its own context.
David Byrne
Maybe I'm overcast. And maybe all my lucks washed down the drain.
Switchfoot
punk is about being an individual and going against the grain and standing up and saying 'This is who I am
Joey Ramone
Punk is about being an individual and going against the grain and standing up and saying 'This is who I am.
Joey Ramone
[T]he piano was to Harlem what brass bands had been to New Orleans. The instrument represented conflicting possibilities -- a pathway for assimilating traditional highbrow culture, a calling card of lowbrow nightlife, a symbol of middle-class prosperity, or, quite simply, a means of making a living.
Ted Gioia
Music is like a psychiatrist. You can tell your guitar things that you can't tell people. And it will answer you with things people can't tell you.
Paul McCartney
If it sounds good, it is good.
Louis Armstrong
reality has too many heads
Bob Dylan
And the waitress is practicing politicsAs the businessmen slowly get stonedYes, they're sharing a drink they call lonelinessBut its better than drinkin' alone
Billy Joel
Don't regret anything you do, because in the end it makes you who you are.
Jared Leto
It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note – it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.
Miles Davis
Even though we've devoted our lives to music, we both know that the most important things happen without a soundtrack.
Ibi Kaslik
Silence enhances music. What you do not play can sweeten what you do. But it is not the same with words. What you do not say can haunt you.
Mitch Albom
The secret is not to make your music louder. But to make the world quieter.
Mitch Albom
I think music has the ability to inspire people and to change hearts, and the heart has the power to change the mind, and the mind has the power to change the world.
Serj Tankian
Theory is a six-letter dirty word to most musicians, but hey, musicians love dirty words, right? And just like all the other dirty words, theory is easy to learn and fun to use!
Ray Harmony
After talking to people and meeting them every day, I realize that a song can be written from one perspective with an objective in mind. What is crazy about it is that many different people can take one song a totally different way. That is so cool, since music is a universal thing and a very personal thing.
Josh Dun
Rock 'n' roll music, in the end, is a source of religious and mystical power. Your playing can suck, your singing can be barely viable, but if when you get together with your pals in front of your audience and make the noise, the one that is drawn from the center of your being, from your godhead, from your gutter, from the universe's infinitesimal genesis point... you're rockin' and you're a rock 'n' roll star in every sense of the word. The punks instinctively knew this and created a third revolution out of it, but it is an essential element in the equation of every great musical unit and rock 'n' roll band, no matter how down-to-earth their presentation.
Bruce Springsteen
That was how we wanted to play, majestic and chaotic.
Anthony Kiedis
T.H. moved through the forest like the melody of a well-known song, in perfect harmony with his surroundings.
Charles de Lint
As Branford Marsalis said in a beautiful essay he write upon Clarence's death, C was blessed with 'the power of musical intent.
Bruce Springsteen
As we'd slogged away for weeks on the Convention Hall stage in isolation, trying to pump life into our much-vaunted songbook, there'd been only one thing missing: you.
Bruce Springsteen
Trends of the times be damned.
Robert Glasper
I would spend my life on the road logging hundreds of thousands of miles and my story was always the same. . . man comes to town, detonates; man leaves town and drives off into the evening; fade to black. Just the way I like it.
Bruce Springsteen
Written in pain, written in aweBy a puzzled man who questionedWhat we were here for
David Bowie
It was a real party of swells.
Elvis Costello
I'm sitting here doing nothing but ageing while my guitar gently weeps
George Harrison
The boy will grow older, and over time there will be other songs – not many – ten or maybe twenty in a lifespan, that stand apart from the rest of the music he will discover. He will realise as he grows older still, and crosses the Canadian border and drives down into Seattle, that not only are these songs holy or sacred, they are hiding songs – what the Aztec Indians call carrion songs – that deal exclusively in darkness, obfuscation, concealment and secrecy. He will realize that, for him, the purpose of these songs has been to shut off the sun, to draw a long shadow down and protect him from the corrosive glare of the world.
Nick Cave