Roxy Music Quotes
-
I don't like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.
-
If you're in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.
-
If you think of the way a composer or say a pop arranger works - he has an idea and he writes it down, so there's one transmission loss. Then he gives the score to a group of musicians who interpret that, so there's another transmission loss. So he's involved with three information losses. Whereas what I nearly always do is work directly to the sound if it doesn't sound right. So there's a continuous loop going on.
-
A way to make new music is to imagine looking back at the past from a future and imagine music that could have existed but didn't. Like East African free jazz, which as far as I know does not exist.
-
With all fashion, what we do is play at being somebody else. We play at inhabiting another kind of world.
-
Musicians are there in front of you, and the spectators sense their tension, which is not the case when you're listening to a record. Your attention is more relaxed. The emotional aspect is more important in live music.
-
Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop.
-
I remember when in the early days of rock'n'roll, when everything sounded totally different, all amazing and blah blah blah blah blah. Now you can play me one second of any record from that time, and I'll say "1959" or "1961." I can hear precisely. It's like it has a huge date stamp on it.
-
I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness, and a better sense of humor.
-
You become acutely aware, if you're touring a lot, that you need new songs to invigorate the live show. And make it interesting for yourself, too.
-
I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren't historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.
-
Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.
-
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.
-
In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.
-
The trouble with New Age music is that there's no evil in it.
-
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.
-
The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.
-
I'm always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven't thought of doing yet.
-
If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas.
-
I think that sex, drugs, art and religion very much overlap with one another and sometimes one becomes another.
-
Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on - including your own incompetence.
-
I cant duplicate my own successes, because part of the creation of that effect is making something happen that you didn't expect.
-
Composition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art.
-
Why should I spoil my mood by wearing an ugly suit?