Roxy Music Quotes
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I've done shows with orchestras, and I like writing with orchestras.
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I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, 'Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!'
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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've had quite a few moments I've liked, so it's good enough.
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I always use the same guitar; I got this guitar years and years ago for nine pounds. It's still got the same strings on it.
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I think audiences are quite comfortable watching something coming into being.
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In fact, quite a lot of what I do has to do with sound texture, and, you can't notate that. You can't notate the sound of "St. Elmo's Fire." There's no way of writing that down. That's because musical notation arose at a time when sound textures were limited. If you said violins and woodwind that defined the sound texture; if I say synthesizer and guitar it means nothing - you're talking about 28,000 variables.
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I'm very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement.
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Everything good proceeds from enthusiasm.
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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.
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People always focus on people like me who use synthesizers, right, which are explicitly electronic and therefore obvious. "Ah, yes, that's electronic music." But they don't realize that so is the concept of actually taking a piece of extant music and literally re-collaging it, taking chunks out and changing the dynamics radically and creating new rhythmic structures with echo and all that. That's real electronic music, as far as I'm concerned.
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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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Don't be ashamed of your own ideas. Most musicians get applauded for sounding like someone else.
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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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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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I have a definite talent for convincing people to try something new. I am a good salesman. When I'm on form, I can sell anything.
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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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Get down with your old Allman Bros. records!
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The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.
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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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The tools are evolving, and people's interests are evolving as well. So, suddenly people like to hear bands, people like Devendra Banhart or the xx, bands that make a kind of virtue of sloppiness. That isn't what they would describe what they're doing, but the fact is they make a virtue of the sort of hand-made nature of what they're doing.
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One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.
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If you had a sign above every studio door saying ‘This Studio is a Musical Instrument’ it would make such a different approach to recording.
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I'm very opinionated.