Roxy Music Quotes
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For me it's always contingent on getting a sound-the sound always suggests what kind of melody it should be. So it's always sound first and then the line afterwards.
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Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven't been made easier technically.
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Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before.
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The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.
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The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.
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In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient - ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.
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Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.
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I'm a painter in sound.
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In my normal life I'm a very unadventurous person.
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I believe in singing.
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At the party, Rob Partridge said to me, 'You gave hope to other balding men.' My new epitaph: 'Co-wrote a couple of decent songs and went bald shamelessly.'
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When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings - to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.
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People tend to play in their comfort zone, so the best things are achieved in a state of surprise, actually.
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I used to think that, given enough goodwill, anybody would be able to 'get' any music, no matter how distant the culture from which it came. And then I heard Chinese opera.
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If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.
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The reason I don't tour is that I don't know how to front a band. What would I do? I can't really play anything well enough to deal with that situation.
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While it's a great indulgence, it's also very interesting to have three bass players on the same track.
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Try to make things that can become better in other people’s minds than they were in yours.
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Sometimes you recognize that there is a category of human experience that has not been identified but everyone knows about it. That is when I find a term to describe it.
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If you don’t call it art, you’re likely to get a better result.
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I think, if you spend a day or - as many people do - a life working only with that aspect of your being, the cerebrum connected to a finger, I feel that the rest of you atrophies, essentially.
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I believe in singing to such an extent that, if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing becomes a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for cooperation with others. This seems to be about the most important thing a school could do for you.
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Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You're glad someone's done it but you don't necessarily want to listen to it.
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By the mid-'60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.