Quotes on Music

A song ain't nothing but a conversation fixed up to where you can talk it over and over without getting tired of it.

If music sounds dated, it means it wasn't very good in the first place.

The best music, you can seek some shelter in it momentarily, but it's essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.

I was real good at music and real bad at everything else.

I'll give up this sort of touring madness certainly, but music-everything is based on music. No, I'll never stop my music.

I think it's important that everybody has access to music, and not just people who live in cities or who can afford to drive to the nearest city.

I'm suspicious of the idea of categories in music and this idea of things being in boxes. To me, that seems unnatural. I write the music that somebody with my biography would write, and the thing that's always driven me is an enthusiasm for the material. I sort of follow the notes to where they want to go.

I think the most important thing for a listener is to realize that he, too, should not listen to music in a passive way; that if you sit in a concert hall and expect to be moved or taken off your seat by the music, it will not happen.

I hope you don't mind,_x000D_ _x000D_ I hope you don't mind,_x000D_ _x000D_ that I put into words,_x000D_ _x000D_ how wonderful life is,_x000D_ _x000D_ now you're in the world.

In the old days, people shared music; they didn't care who made it. A song would be owned by a village, and anyone could sing it, change the words, whatever. That is how humans treated music until the late 19th century. Now, with the Internet, we are going back to having tribal attitudes towards music.

The majority of the people think that noise is not music. I want to accept noise and even errors and glitches. I enjoy them.

If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough.

I always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

Jazz in itself is not struggling. That is, the music itself is not struggling... It's the attitude that's in trouble. My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history.

When you go to a great concert, you feel this arc, almost like the music of a well-chosen set takes you on this trip through emotions and through various forms of intellectual engagement.

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.

Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn't want me to be too famous too young.

ELECTED Silence, sing to me And beat upon my whorlèd ear, Pipe me to pastures still and be The music that I care to hear.

I like any and all of my associations with music: writing, playing, and listening. We write and play from our perspective, and the audience listens from its perspective. If and when we agree, I am lucky.

An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

I discovered that the most interesting music of all was made by simply lining the loops in unison, and letting them slowly shift out of phase with other.