Quotes on Music

The music is really about sharing an experience. That's why we call it Stay Human. It's like we're sharing this genuine human exchange.

Most people wouldn't know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another.

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.

The best way to get people to connect with an issue is to humanize it. You can do so much more powerfully with music and touch the heart.

All deep things are song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!

Just give a drum roll, announce my name & I come out & sing. I have a contract that says I'm a singer. So I sing.

I have always tried with my shows - win, lose, or draw - to take the boundaries of music as far as I can.

Don't threaten me with love, baby. Let's just go walking in the rain.

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

Risk is at the heart of jazz. Every note we play is a risk.

The more people smoke herb, the more Babylon fall.

Music is the one part of the entertainment business where you can't fool anybody into buying a record.

My own thing is in my head. I hear sounds and if I don't get them together nobody else will.

Don't use your brain to play it, let your feelings guide your fingers.

The music comes through me, and I let it come the way it comes, and it shapes itself. I just hold space for it. I don't intend to write it for a purpose, but it comes as it comes and am proud of the way it can support change because I believe strongly in what I sing about.

There are five things to write songs about: I'm leaving you. You're leaving me. I want you. You don't want me. I believe in something. Five subjects, and 12 notes. For all that, we musicians do pretty well.

There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because l love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth, an open-air art boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art.

The difference between noise and music is in what the musician does with the sounds.

I think you just have to be yourself instead of catering your sound to a specific audience, make the music you want to make, and the audience will find you.

If we start putting music out constantly where people don't think no more, people go crazy. We're gonna lose the love of heart, of soul. And if the world lose that, I think the world is doomed.