Roxy Music Quotes
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I loved music from the age of eight. Jazz and blues. But also Little Richard and Elvis Presley.
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My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.
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I want to rethink 'surrender' as an active verb.
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The seven white notes on the piano - each section of the piece (there are 12 sections) is five of those seven white notes. If you calculate it, there are 21 groups of five notes in any group of seven notes. And although there are 12 sections, this piece actually uses nine of those groups because some of the sections repeat earlier ones. So that's the formula. It's very simple as a way of generating something. It's my inner minimalist.
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You can't really imagine music without technology.
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I want to make something that is breathtaking. Of course, you can't make something that is always breathtaking, or you would never be able to breathe. You would collapse.
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The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.
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I've noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it's far enough in the future.
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I'd rather hold one note for an hour and modulate it so that it means something than play 3,000 notes in 15 seconds.
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Most game music is based on loops effectively.
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My guitar only has five strings 'cause the top one broke and I decided not to put it back on: when I play chords I only play bar chords, and the top one always used to cut me there.
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We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.
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You know that in order to copyright material somebody has to write it down for you. Any piece of recorded material has to be scored in order for it to be copyrighted. I've seen the scores of my things and they don't resemble the music in any way. If you give them to somebody who has never heard the music and say, "What does this sound like to you?" they'll play you something that has no relationship with the music it derives from. Notation simply isn't adequate.
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If you watch any good player, they're using different parts of their body and working with instruments that respond to those movements. They're moving in many dimensions at once.
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I suppose I am reluctant about being any sort of 'star' and I didn't particularly want to be portrayed as one.
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Why should I spoil my mood by wearing an ugly suit?
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I don't live in the past at all; I'm always wanting to do something new. I make a point of constantly trying to forget and get things out of my mind.
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But when you get music and words together, that can be a very powerful thing.
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Sometimes you're quite fortunate, being on the stage, getting to meet people like Salvador Dali.
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I love good, loud speakers.
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I'm often accused of being ahead of my time, but it's simply not true. The truth is that everybody else is behind.
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The Marshall guitar amplifier doesn't just get louder when you turn it up. It distorts the sound to produce a whole range of new harmonics, effectively turning a plucked string instrument into a bowed one.
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Gospel music is never pessimistic, it's never 'oh my god, its all going down the tubes', like the blues often is.
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In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.