We live in an age of music for people who don't like music. The record industry discovered some time ago that there aren't that many people who actually like music. For a lot of people, music's annoying, or at the very least they don't need it. They discovered if they could sell music to a lot of those people, they could sell a lot more records.
We live in an age lit by lightnin'; after the flash, we're blind again.
Probably the deepest use of music and of art is to create conscience.
The more perfect music we have, the more attractive the peculiarities and anomalies of human performance become. Perfection is a second rate idea.
Risk is what separates the artist from the artisan.
If it is true that we have a personal relationship with God, then that's enough for me.
Music was the medium through which knowledge was passed from generation to generation.
My advice for young people is that, if you want to be a musician, the thing to do is practice eight hours a day.
When the arts are eliminated, children get bored and tired of school. When the arts are included, children's imaginations are allowed to run wild.
The hallmark of an artist is generosity.
The essence of show business is, if you see a tight-rope walker go across a tight rope, everybody claps. But, if you see him wobble, everybody gasps.
Listen, the story of the United States is this: One kid, without anything, walks out of his house, down the road, with nothing but a guitar and conquers the world. And we've done that again, and again, and again – Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Jimmy Rogers, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters.
I think, especially among the New York intelligentsia at that time, that there was a reason Bob Dylan went to New York to happen, because there was a culture developed there around the ideas of civil rights, around the idea of democracy growing out of Emerson and Thoreau, these ideas of the fanfare for the common man.
In other words, I'd say the whole story of Bob Dylan is one man's search for God. The turns and the steps he takes to find God are his business. I think he went to a study group at the Vineyard, and it created a lot of excitement.
Honesty is the most subversive of all disguises.
I'm not stupid enough to want to be famous. But I would like to be able to earn a living playing music.
Technology changes nothing.
I've seen a study in the last year that digital sound actually induces stress in the listener.
The record business is dangerous to the health of bands and individuals, which is something I'm just now learning. But it's not dangerous in any of the ways people think; it's not that they try to make you compromise your art. That's not the problem.
I don't want to make music for people who don't care about music.
I got out of high school, bought a recording studio and started operating it as an engineer and a producer.
You know, the thing that struck me about Civil War music was how bloody it was; it was full of hatred. There was incredible vitriol in it.
I naturally wanted to be saved, so when I came home I told my mom I wanted to be confirmed. That's the way I related to it, being raised an Episcopalian. I went to Dallas and got confirmed.
It's also ironic that in the old days of tape and tape hiss and vinyl records and surface noise, we were always trying to get records louder and louder to overcome that.
Everything around a writer, or musician in the record business, probably everything in all the United States or in all of western civilization, is about competition.
