Roxy Music Quotes
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Something I've realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if we're smart about it.
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Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!
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The trouble with New Age music is that there's no evil in it.
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Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. That's what surfers do - take control of the situation, then be carried, then take control. In the last few thousand years, we've become incredibly adept technically. We've treasured the controlling part of ourselves and neglected the surrendering part.
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Much as I love the northeast, I didn't want to spend my life there. I wanted to experiment. Savour everything you can while you're here! Touring, seeing the world... That in itself gives you a different perspective.
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When you make something you are always offering some choices and denying others.
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In the future, you won't buy artists' works; you'll buy software that makes original pieces of 'their' works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box.
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I do love being in my studio. Especially at night.
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At home I don't really have any drum machines or anything like that, I just have a piano and a cassette machine, an old-fashioned one, an old relic which I've always used.
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I don't do interviews at all when I'm on tour, so this time, on a day off, I'll do that kind of thing a little bit. I don't do big promotion schedules, not when I'm touring.
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I like L.A., but I shouldn't live there.
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One way of working is just bring a group of totally different musicians together and encourage them to stick to their guns, not to do the thing that normally happens in a working situation where everyone homogenizes and concedes certain points - so eventually they're all playing in roughly the same style. I wanted quite the opposite of that. I wanted them to accent their styles, so that they pulled away. So there would be a kind of space in the middle where I could operate, and attempt to make these things coalesce in some way. In fact quite a lot of my stuff has arisen from that.
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I did some songs for Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby. I had done a jazz album of Roxy songs, and they used bits of it in the film. It would be nice to score a movie one day.
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I think audiences are quite comfortable watching something coming into being.
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Nearly all the things I do that are of any merit at all start off just being good fun, and I think I'm sort of building up to doing something else quite soon.
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Composition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art.
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I'm very opinionated.
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Get down with your old Allman Bros. records!
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You can't have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits, it keeps becoming something else.
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John Cage made you realise that there wasn't a thing called noise, it was just music you hadn't appreciated.
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Although cover notes for classical music albums tend to say that the trill of flutes suggests mountain streams and so on, I don't think anybody listens to music with the expectation that they're going to be presented with a sort of landscape painting.
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Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better.
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The micro-compositions are the pieces themselves, but the macro-composition is the whole set of them and how it moves from track to track and how the titles relate to one another, for example. Always when I do records like this of a selection of instrumental pieces - the titles, to me, are very important.
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Quite often, and in fact more often, I would say, I'm struggling all the way through to think, "What is it I like about this? What is the personality of this thing I'm hearing that I like so much?" And it's nearly always a sort of mixed emotion, which is why I like it. It's something that I have mixed feelings about in the sense that it's both, say, placid and dangerous, or bitter and sweet, or dark and bright.