T Bone Burnett Quotes
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I'm not stupid enough to want to be famous. But I would like to be able to earn a living playing music.
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I don't hear any of the popular stuff unless it's good 'cause I pay no attention to popular culture, at all.
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My advice for young people is that, if you want to be a musician, the thing to do is practice eight hours a day.
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For centuries, everything was taught through music. History was taught through music; language and mathematics were taught through music.
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The more perfect music we have, the more attractive the peculiarities and anomalies of human performance become. Perfection is a second rate idea.
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We live in an age of music for people who don't like music. The record industry discovered some time ago that there aren't that many people who actually like music. For a lot of people, music's annoying, or at the very least they don't need it. They discovered if they could sell music to a lot of those people, they could sell a lot more records.
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When the arts are eliminated, children get bored and tired of school. When the arts are included, children's imaginations are allowed to run wild.
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People make art on the sides of buildings, and they'll make art on the sides of trains. They'll make art wherever they decide to make art. The technology that people are working with now will be replaced in 10 years, so that's not where your future is, if you're a musician.
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I think, especially among the New York intelligentsia at that time, that there was a reason Bob Dylan went to New York to happen, because there was a culture developed there around the ideas of civil rights, around the idea of democracy growing out of Emerson and Thoreau, these ideas of the fanfare for the common man.
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Listen, the story of the United States is this: One kid, without anything, walks out of his house, down the road, with nothing but a guitar and conquers the world. And we've done that again, and again, and again – Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Jimmy Rogers, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters.
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Music, for centuries and centuries, was used to teach everything. It was used to teach language, mathematics, history. The news was music. Everything traveled by song. It was used to teach ethics. It was used to create conscience, probably more than anything.
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Let the business take care of itself. If you get involved in the business, every hour that you're involved in business is an hour that you're not practicing. And every hour that you're not practicing is another hour further away from where you want to be.
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If Picasso walked into Disney looking for a job, they would throw him out on the street. Couldn't draw good enough.