Music kept me off the streets and out of trouble and gave me something that was mine that no one could take away from me.
Interpretation
Music provides a refuge and a personal identity that can protect one from negative influences.
Eddie Van Halen highlights the transformative power of music in his life, emphasizing how it served as a protective barrier against life's challenges and distractions. By dedicating himself to music, he found a sense of ownership and purpose that not only kept him safe but also represented an invaluable part of his identity that was not subject to external control or influence.
In practice
During a speech about the importance of the arts in education, this quote can be used to illustrate how music can provide structure and purpose.
When I'm home on a break, I lock myself in my room and play guitar. After two or three hours, I start getting into this total meditation. It's a feeling few people experience, and that's usually when I come up with weird stuff. It just flows. I can't force myself. I don't sit down and say I've got to practice.
Music is for people. The word 'pop' is simply short for popular. It means that people like it. I'm just a normal jerk who happens to make music. As long as my brain and fingers work, I'm cool.
There's a plaque on our wall that says we've sold over 65 million albums, and I don't feel I've accomplished anything. I feel like I'm just getting started.
And if I would have taken lessons I probably wouldn't have done it, and what forced me to do all this weird stuff on the guitar was I couldn't afford effects pedals, I didn't have all this stuff when I was a kid so I just tried to squeeze all the weird noises I could out of the guitar, which brings me to building guitars.
If you want to be a rock star or just be famous, then run down the street naked, you'll make the news or something. But if you want music to be your livelihood, then play, play, play and play! And eventually you'll get to where you want to be.
It's always a Catch-22 situation. They hate you if you're the same, and they hate you if you're different.
I get little kids who recognize me from 'Mary Poppins,' and it just delights me because it's our third generation.
I'm not afraid of a big studio film; I trust my instincts. But for me, it's not really about box office. It's about looking back on your work and not having to apologize for it.
If politicians can't do it, I want to do it. We have to do it. Artists, put it in paintings. Poets, put it in poems, novels. That's what we have to do. And I think it's so important to save the world.
We watch a romantic comedy because we want to cry, say, or an action movie so we can participate in heroics. Horror's different. It can hit you with a moment of revulsion so hard you might want to erase the last five minutes of your life, please.
For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
It's kind of a subversive act to tell a story of a woman past a certain age, to develop a four-hour movie based on a marriage and a story of two people past middle age.
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