Roxy Music Quotes
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It must be really hard to be starting out in music now.
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Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.
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I often work by avoidance.
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People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.
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I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.
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I hate the thought that someone had picked up one of my song records and was really excited about it, and walks [out of] a record shop with On Land and is disappointed because it isn't what they wanted. So, I try to make signs, graphically and visually, to say to people "Okay, this is this department of my work and this is this other department of my work." And of course I'm very pleased if people like all of them, but I don't want them to feel deceived at any point.
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Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well.
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Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.
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Democracy is a daring concept - a hope that we'll be best governed if all of us participate in the act of government. It is meant to be a conversation, a place where the intelligence and local knowledge of the electorate sums together to arrive at actions that reflect the participation of the largest possible number of people.
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Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop.
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I very rarely play the piano at home. Deliberately, so that when I do play it, I love it.
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Even though I'm known as a pop musician, I have a seriousness about what I do.
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I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.
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I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.
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Whenever there's a new music, there's a new way of listening. And whenever there's a new way of listening, there are new musics that follow from that. And people start listening differently - that can either mean in different places or at different volumes or in different social groups or through different technologies.
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You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.
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Basically, you're still sitting there using just the muscles of your hand, really. Of one hand, actually. It's another example of the transfer of literacy to making music because the assumption is that everything important is happening in your head; the muscles are there simply to serve the head. But that isn't how traditional players work at all; musicians know that their muscles have a lot of stuff going on as well. They're using their whole body to make music, in fact.
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The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.
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I mostly used the studio devices, because I knew what they had. Generally I find I'm happy to use whatever's around. If there's nothing there I'll make something. For example, one of the things I tried doing was getting a tiny loudspeaker and feeding the instruments off the tape through this tiny speaker and then through this huge long plastic tube - about 50 feet long - that they used to clean out the swimming pool in the place where I was staying. You get this really hollow, cavernous, weird sound, a very nice sound. We didn't use it finally, but nonetheless we well could have.
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I wouldn't call myself a synaesthete in the sense that Nabokov was. But I'll talk about a sound as being cold blue or dark brown. For descriptive purposes, yes, I often see colors when I'm listening to music and think, 'Oh, there's not enough sort of yellowy stuff in here, or not enough white.'
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Culture is everything you don't have to do.
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Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism.
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I think that sex, drugs, art and religion very much overlap with one another and sometimes one becomes another.
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Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don't fit in a very interesting way.