Musician Quotes
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You know, John Coltrane has been sort of a god to me. Seems like, in a way, he didn't get the inspiration out of other musicians. He had it. When you hear a cat do a thing like that, you got to go along with him. I think I heard Coltrane before I really got close to Miles [Davis]. Miles had a tricky way of playing his horn that I didn't understand as much as I did Coltrane. I really didn't understand what Coltrane was doing, but it was so exciting the thing that he was doing.
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I moved to Portland because Modest Mouse is there. I didn't necessarily mean to live there permanently, but I've got a really good feeling for it. The sensibility there really suits me. I happened to have grown up in Manchester, a city that was a pretty cool place to be a musician. It's close to Portland in a lot of ways.
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I think jazz is a phenomenal creative force, because it's one man, one vote as you're playing, but it's a collective thing, what you're doing. You're listening to all the musicians around you and you're working within that structure.
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I don't think in time signatures, and when I do, what I write is generally 3/4 or 4/4, the most basic, straightforward stuff. I think that comes from just not being a super-schooled musician.
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You decide to be a musician, you have to put in the time.
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Lou Reed's music has been in the lives of millions of people all over the world for decades. He had a truly universal presence and was respected by musicians across all genres.
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A musician's attempt to summarize his or her work leads to all this prescriptive chatter, or what I call the Modifier's Madness. A lot of adjectives working overtime.
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One thing that you hope for when you want to be a musician is that you have that recognizable sound.
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Recording sessions were stimulating to photograph, because everything was in motion: the subject, the musicians, the technicians and the photographer. You needed fast reflexes to keep up with moving targets, and sensitivity and skill to get the pictures while keeping out of the performers' eyeline so as not to break their concentration.
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Meditation practice is like piano scales, basketball drills, ballroom dance class. Practice requires discipline; it can be tedious; it is necessary. After you have practiced enough, you become more skilled at the art form itself. You do not practice to become a great scale player or drill champion. You practice to become a musician or athlete. Likewise, one does not practice meditation to become a great meditator. We meditate to wake up and live, to become skilled at the art of living.
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She knew the intensity of adolescence, and knew no cure for it except growing up. And then one has age and experience, and mourns the loss of intensity. Maybe it's why musicians and mathmaticians are said to peak young-poetry needs the fire of an unbounded universe.
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Musicians are like politicians. They're the last people who should be making music, just like politicians are the last people who should be running things.
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Every musician wants to do something which will hold up for a long time, and I guess we did it with 'Stairway to Heaven.'
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It's crazy to think of myself as a musician. It's ridiculous that I get to do it, and I don't necessarily mean music. Getting to do something you really enjoy as a job is an incredible privilege, I think. I still don't really feel like a musician outside of the actual music.
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I'm a folk preacher. A folk therapist. A folk musician. I come from authentically that which is of my experience. Therefore, the music is strictly from the soul, strictly improvisational.
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I'm a much better musician than astronomer. I think the world got the right choice.
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Time and persistence has shown me that I can succeed at sharing my art with others as a musician while running my own music business. And that kind of success is as good as I could have ever wished for.
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If you are a musician who has released albums, it would perhaps be morbidly interesting to know how much you would be owed if everyone who now has your music had actually bought your record.
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Ike's problem was that he was a musician that always wanted to be a star; and was a star, locally, but never internationally... so he then changed the name to Ike and changed my name to Tina because if I ran away, Tina was his name. It was patented as you call it.
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I don't think I'm even a musician. I don't play a lot of instruments, not really a soloist or anything.
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I guess every musician looks forward to a point where they can just kind of make an album that truly is like a nice art album.
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It's so funny being a Christian musician. It always scares me when people think so highly of Christian music, Contemporary Christian music especially. Because I kinda go, I know a lot of us, and we don't know jack about anything. Not that I don't want you to buy our records and come to our concerts. I sure do. But you should come for entertainment. If you really want spiritual nourishment, you should go to church... you should read the Scriptures.
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I want to make a picture that could stand on its own, regardless of what it was a picture of. I've never been a bit interested in the fact that this was a picture of a blues musician or a street corner or something.
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When you are so strongly drawn to music, you can't not be a musician.
