Quotes on Solo

You can go out and find ways to make your own record and get it out there now. If you really want to, you can be heard. Keep things simple. Learn to go out and play solo. That's a really really good thing to learn, if you're a singer-songwriter. Don't be dependent on a band because you may not always be able to afford one.

I'm more interested in melodic things. I think the biggest challenge when you go to play a solo is trying to invent a melody on the spot.

It's the group sound that's important, even when you're playing a solo. You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That's jazz.

I start from one point and go as far as possible. But, unfortunately, I never lose my way. I 'localize,' which is to say that I think always in a given space. I rarely think of the whole of a solo, and only very briefly. I always return to the small part of the solo that I was in the process of playing.

Our little solos are a note in an immense chorus vibrating grandly through the universe, a chorus which accepts and harmonizes the whir of the cricket and the long drum-roll of the stars.

I think the drummer should sit back there and play some drums, and never mind about the tunes. Just get up there and wail behind whoever is sitting up there playing the solo. And this is what is lacking, definitely lacking in music today.

That one record changed everything for me. After Sgt. Pepper, it's the most influential record in the history of rock and roll. It affected Pink Floyd deeply, deeply, deeply. Philosophically, other albums may have been more important, like Lennon's first solo album. But sonically, the way the record's constructed, I think Music from Big Pink is fundamental to everything that happened after it.

Learn to play the piano, man, and then you can figure out crazy solos of your own.

I was asked in an interview once: You're writing another book with a female lead? Aren't you afraid you're going to be pigeonholed? And I thought, I write a team superhero book, an uplifting solo hero book, I write a horror-western, and I write a ghost story. What am I gonna be pigeonholed as? Has a man in the history of men ever been asked if he was going to be pigeonholed because he wrote two consecutive books with male leads?

A good solo is like a book. It will start out in a phrase, it will go on in paragraphs, and then it will have a great ending.

I always saw myself as a singer-songwriter, a solo-artist, that's why working with other artists was never satisfying for me.

A cap of good acid costs $5, and for that you can hear the Universal Symphony, with God singing solo and the Holy Ghost on drums.

I enjoy making solo albums because over the years it's evolved into more of a genuine personal expression of story-telling and day dreams, and I work in a way that has more control.

It's the group sound that's important, even when you're playing a solo.

The radio is playing jazz, and I listen to the sound of the trumpet playing a solo until I become that sound.

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

On the day I started college in 1979, no woman had ever been on the United States Supreme Court or served as the Speaker of the House. None had been an astronaut or the solo anchor of a network evening news broadcast. Not one had been president of an Ivy League college or run a serious campaign for president.

I just assumed the world was full of solo percussionists. I couldn't find sticks or music or anything where I was, but that was expected because there was nothing there anyway. And I think that was possibly the greatest asset for me, just not knowing.

If I wished to do something, even if I couldn't find anyone who wanted to make the effort with me, I would go out solo climbing. I did find solo climbing very challenging and a little frightening. You knew that you were completely on your own, and you had to overcome all the problems and possible dangers.

I didn't leave the band to go solo so much as to stop feeling like a production item.

There are some pop songs I hate but I can't get them out of my head. Our songs also have the standard pop format: Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, bad solo. All in all, I think we sound like The Knack and the Bay City Rollers being molested by Black Flag and Black Sabbath.