Leon Russell Quotes
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There was a period in my life when I was trying to write standards: songs that everybody recorded. I did a pretty good run of it.
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When you play with another piano player, it's just second nature to play the parts that need to be played.
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When I was in grade school, I had a little duet act with a guy who was a beautiful singer, and somebody recorded it on a wire machine. They played it back for us, and I went, 'I hear Donald, but what is that other ugly voice?' It turned out to be me, of course.
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When I was born, I had a birth injury in my second and third vertebrae. It gave me what they called spastic paralysis, which is actually cerebral palsy.
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I often haven't heard the music since I've recorded it. I don't listen to it. When I do hear it, like at someone's house, I'll listen. I'm probably the most pleased with the stuff I did with New Grass Revival.
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Watching yourself on film, if you've never watched yourself on film before, you want to go crawl into bed and stay there for a week.
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I played on a few Frank Sinatra sessions.
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It's like, baseball is a very good game, but it's very difficult to explain to somebody, if you stop and think about it. I just feel my life is like that.
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All my writing takes place during the recording of the master tapes. I never do have songs when I start up an album. I actually write them while I record.
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I think probably my main advice to new artists is if you want to be in the music business, you need to be dang serious about it because it's a rough business.
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I started writing rather late in the game. I was fascinated about the story about how Bob Dylan, for 'Nashville Skyline,' wrote between takes. So I'd try to sing new songs off the top of my head. I had rather less than spectacular success on that. But a lot of my songs were done that way.
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I have damaged nerve endings on the right side, so my piano style comes from designing stuff I can play with my right hand. And some of it effectively mimics classical stuff.
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I started playing in nightclubs when I was about 14 in Oklahoma.
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I had two parts of my body: my left side, which was strong and somewhat dumb, and the other side was weak and hard to control but perhaps smarter. It gave me a very strong sense of the duality of the plane that we live in.
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I don't think there's any danger of me playing Indian music. However, I did a song of George Harrison's 'Beware of Darkness' that was kind of like that. That was an illusion. I was playing that on a thumbtack piano, and Jim Gordon was playing tablas. He's an amazing player. That was as close to India as I ever got.
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I am not aware of my public image or what people think of me. I don't evaluate myself that way.
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Songwriting was very tough for me... I would go in and sit and hope for inspiration to come, and it was rarely forthcoming.
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The Pentecostals had horns, drums, guitars, huge choirs, and screaming and dancing and all kinds of stuff. That was for me.
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I'm kind of the Forrest Gump of rock n' roll.
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I used to play on Phil Spector's records, and he liked to use three pianists.
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My feet are giving out on me. But I have a wheelchair that folds out on my tour bus. I've also got this little tricycle, so if I want to go someplace, I get those out.
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Sometimes one misses the sign posts as you're going down the road. They aren't as obvious as they become when you get to the end of the road, so to speak.
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The first canon of my religion is that you shouldn't try to convince anybody to believe like you do.
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I'm happy to have a job. I play a little, write a little, perform some. It's not like it's an engineered, well-manufactured plan or anything. I just do what I do.