If you're making music, you must want to turn other people on to it, whether you're number one in the charts or number 60. I don't know, that's a commercial thing, but just the fact that other people like you... there's no point in making music, otherwise. Otherwise, you might as well make it in your bedroom and leave it there.
Interpretation
The essence of making music is to share it with others rather than just creating it for oneself.
In this quote, Paul Weller emphasizes the importance of connecting with an audience through music. He suggests that the value of music lies in its ability to resonate with others, highlighting that creating music solely for personal enjoyment is less meaningful. Music becomes truly valuable when it moves and engages listeners, regardless of commercial success on charts.
In practice
During a music festival speech to inspire upcoming artists.
I think, with age, you learn that it comes in bursts and you've got no control over it. I'm not one of those people who says, 'I've got to write a song every day.' I just store up ideas, and really I have to wait until it finds me; I know when I'm ready to write. It used to frustrate me, but it doesn't any more. It's just how it is.
When I'm dead, I wanna leave a body of work, like authors or great painters do. I don't wanna get ideas above my station, but why shouldn't this be comparable? Pop music was supposed to be a flash in the pan, but here we are 50 years later, and it means something to us, and it always will do. It's incredibly important.
I'd like to think I've left something in the world. Without in any way trying to be morbid, but life is very short, and I'd like to think I'd leave some body of work that would inspire other musicians long after I've gone.
It's quite liberating to get to a certain age, 'cos you're not chasing number one hits or trying to be an international superstar. I've done all that. I'm not out to prove much more to anyone but myself really, to be an artist and see if there is a new undiscovered music out there for me to make.
Playing live is what it's all about for me. It's cathartic, it's emotional, it's about communing with people. The way you feel after a gig is a such a powerful thing.
There's something to be said for going right into people's living rooms. I think actors have always loved that medium - you're right in there with people in their homes. A lot of very audacious work is being done on television.
The more abstract is form, the more clear and direct its appeal.
It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation. Then an immense space opens up in silence and an endlessly fecund sub-universe the writer descends, and asks the reader to descend after him, not merely to gain instructions but also to experience delight, the delight of mind freed from matter and exultant in the strength it has stolen from matter.
Out in the world not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather anything might happen, always did.
At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant.
I have found that all ugly things are made by those who strive to make something beautiful, and that all beautiful things are made by those who strive to make something useful.
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