Music Quotes - Page 76

If you wanted to chart new territories and head off over the horizon, you had to make sure you weren't overly influenced by what others were doing ... so it didn't matter what other bands were doing ... we did what we were doing.

I don't know why, it's the same reason why you like some music and you don't like others. There's something about it that you like. Ultimately I don't find it's in my best interests to try and analyze it, since it's fundamentally emotional.

I love you so, But why I love you, I'll never know.

O Black and unknown bards of long ago, How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?

Gifted women musicians and composers rarely received their due.

You decide to be a musician, you have to put in the time.

Really good music isn't just to be heard, you know? It's almost like a hallucination

Basically my influences have been American influences. It's been blues, gospel, swing era music, bebop music, Broadway show music, classical music. It's like making a stew. You put all these various ingredients in it. You season it with this. You put that in it. You put the other in it. You mix it all up and it comes out something neat, something that you created.

Why do you judge me as a musician, John? All I'm interested in is making money.

Singing songs that make you slit your wrists

I don't just write music to esthetically satisfy somebody. The reason I write music is that I feel it's a vehicle or channel which leads to your true self, your essence.

Modern European composers...have very largely received their stimulus, their rhythms and impulses from Machine Age America. They have a much older tradition of musical technique which has helped them put into musical terms a little more clearly the thoughts that originated here. They can express themselves more glibly.

Perfume was first created to mask the stench of foul and offensive odors... Spices and bold flavorings were created to mask the taste of putrid and rotting meat... What then was music created for? Was it to drown out the voices of others, or the voices within ourselves? I think I know.

I started out with the guitar and was a studio musician back in the 50s, and then got shot in my finger.

What I'm doing, I prefer to call that jazz, because it is a beautiful word - I love it.

If it weren't for the Beatles, I would not be a musician.

When playing music, it is possible to achieve a unique sense of peace.

My name ain't Steve Miller, but I fly like an Eagle.

The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own.

Approach your guitar intelligently, and if there are limits, don't deny them. Work within your restrictions. Somethings you can do better than others, some things you can't do as well. So accentuate the positive.

A musician cannot move others unless he too is moved. He must of necessity feel all of the affects that he hopes to arouse in his audience, for the revealing of his own humour will stimulate a like humour in the listener.

If you had a sign above every studio door saying ‘This Studio is a Musical Instrument’ it would make such a different approach to recording.

I'm always looking for a kind of new musical entity to sort of move into a motion picture venue

Music fills in for words a lot of the time when people don't know what to say, and I think music can be more eloquent than words.

My music fights against the system that teaches to live and die.