Quotes on Music

One of poetry's great effects, through its emphasis upon feeling, association, music, and image - things we recognize and respond to even before we understand why - is to guide us toward the part of ourselves so deeply buried that it borders upon the collective.

Paul Ryan's love of Rage Against the Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades.

Vietnam was the defining event for my generation. It spilled over into all facets of American life - into music, into the pulpits, in churches of our country. It spilled over into the city streets, police forces. And even if you were born late in the generation, Vietnam was still part of your childhood.

I don't see it in terms of changing things, but rather using language and music as weapons for fighting a mainstream media which is predominately right wing, and loyal to the political framework and its corporate interests.

I'm making music for the people. If y'all love the music, y'all gonna buy the music.

Poems are a form of music, and language just happens to be our instrument - language and breath.

Music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment.

Well, I've been recording myself on a computer since I was about 13 or 14. So it's completely entwined with my creative process. Essentially, it allows you to make music that's better and smarter than you are, by using your ears to lead the way.

Some of my favorite music in the world is Haydn. I had a sabbatical one year and made myself one promise: to play a different Haydn piano sonata each day - they are inexhaustible treasures.

We have to be evangelists for music. We couldn't just be high priests of music.

Learning music is a birthright. And you have to start young.

My only interest is in sharing great music with more and more people.

There's no reason music should be difficult for an audience to understand.

I've always felt that music is an art form that deserves to live the life of the artist.

When music is crashing around us, when you hear the same five songs on the radio that aren't really saying much, we can always go back to great music. Great music always lives on.

Music helps me tell my story. That's where I can really be heard. But there's so much focus on the things that aren't music.

In order to understand the history of the banjo, and the history of bluegrass music, we need to move beyond the narrative we've inherited, beyond generalizations that bluegrass is mostly derived from a Scotch-Irish tradition with influences from Africa. It is actually a complex Creole music that comes from multiple cultures.

Music is powerful. As people listen to it, they can be affected. They respond.

Music is real. It affects people; it's real.

I was very sure I did not want to be the stereotype of what Indian people are seen as, which is Bollywood and henna. That's all great! It's what we are, and I love it. I love saris; I love music. I love henna; I love dancing, but that's not all we are.

For me, let's keep jazz as folk music. Let's not make jazz classical music. Let's keep it as street music, as people's everyday-life music. Let's see jazz musicians continue to use the materials, the tools, the spirit of the actual time that they're living in, as what they build their lives as musicians around.