Musician Quotes
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Rock records. It's the main source of inspiration for people - fans, or musicians, or both - to act out in ways that they wouldn't normally act out. Especially rock critics. Ultimately, records don't really hurt anybody, and neither do reviews.
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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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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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To be honest, I've never looked really hard for musicians. I'll just randomly meet people. I've never interviewed bandmates or anything like that. The reason I like playing with Chad and Devin is that they're just really, really good musicians and good players. There's not a lot of sloppiness going on.
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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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Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't leaving being musician because I use to like it when noone came to see me playing, because I didn't feel any pressure. I can enjoy myself and probably play better. Sometimes when I play, people expect something of me, and I'm not always able to to that. Quite often. So I get totaly nervous
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In the end, I think musicians know that getting up in the morning and making music you love doesn't necessarily mean that you deserve billions of dollars or worship from anybody.
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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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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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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'm a much better musician than astronomer. I think the world got the right choice.
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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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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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One thing that you hope for when you want to be a musician is that you have that recognizable sound.
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As a musician or a performer, you're meant to know what you're about, but it's ridiculous that someone 14 would have any idea of what they're about.
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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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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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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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Armstrong was the key creator of the mature working language of jazz. Three decades after his death and more than three-quarters of a century since his influence first began to spread, not a single musician who has mastered that language fails to make daily use, knowingly or unknowingly, of something that was invented by Louis Armstrong.
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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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If you want to play something that you hear, you need to listen with your mind's eye. You've heard of the mind's eye, right? Your mind has an ear too. It's a kind of listening, but it's not using your ears to listen. It's listening with your inner ear, and that's what you want to translate onto the guitar.
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I never learned to verbalize an abstract musical concept. No thank you. The whole point of being a serious musician is to avoid verbalization whenever you can.
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When you are so strongly drawn to music, you can't not be a musician.
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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.
