Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Musicians are hungry for new music.
My main professional experience is touring in a rock band.
It's not a hard sell to be asked to do something in Ireland.
As much as you try to organize your life, life will surprise you.
I like to write on tour busses and airplanes. Something about moving.
Nobody plans on playing their own songs in front of thousands of people.
A great painting is something that you can come back to again and again.
Working with Bob Weir directly, we learned how high the bar is for Dead music.
We've played in places where there were more of us onstage than in the audience.
If you make rock music with guitars in it, the Radiohead comparison is inevitable.
I don't labour over my lead guitar solos; they're better just caught in the moment.
When I'm writing instrumental music, I try to find musical and non-musical inspirations.
As a band gets more successful, there's a danger of falling in love with your own shadow.
I studied classical guitar in school, and that type of stuff has led to writing for Kronos.
I love the physicality of instruments, and instruments as objects, like dancers are bodies.
American politics are important because it affects the entire world in often negative ways.
Playing pentatonic scales over orchestral music is not something I want to do or listen to.
David Harrington, who's the violinist and founder of Kronos, is a super open-minded and adventurous guy.
I'm not trying to take over the world, but I find it really rewarding to write, and I thrive on learning.
Early on, I was a performer playing classical music. It's in my DNA in a way that I can't begin to extract it.
With 'Boxer,' we made the kind of music we wanted to make and didn't really worry about what the expectation was.
I think that becoming a successful rock band is a little like becoming a professional athlete. Nobody plans on it.
In a way it's the emotional feeling that you get in a good rock song or folk song, there's just nothing that rivals that.
Bands like Arcade Fire finding a larger audience has opened a lot of doors. They've empowered a whole community in Montreal.
My grandmother was born in Russia, and she came through Poland on her way to America in the early 20s. She moved to Brooklyn.
If you learn classical guitar, you play Bach, and then John Dowland. He's the greatest. He's interesting for many, many reasons.
As a pop musician, as someone who makes songs, the best ideas are the simplest. They come, and that's the lightning bolt moment.
Part of what I enjoy about writing classical music is communicating through the score and collaborating with such amazing musicians.
We've gotten better as a live band. The songs have been allowed to grow with our audience. I don't think I would have done it any other way.
There are all kind of corners of the musical world that are deeply influenced by the Dead that one wouldn't expect. Lee Ranaldo is a crazy Deadhead.
To me, a song like 'Demons' or the title 'Trouble Will Find Me' are acknowledgments that you can't really plan for life, and you can't plan for trouble.
I can imagine myself as an old man writing music for choir or orchestra. I don't know that I'll be touring six months out of the year in a rock band when I'm 60.
My background in music is classical - I did graduate school in music. At that time, I was studying composition, but I was studying classical guitar very seriously.
When I'm scoring something like a string quartet, it's all notated music, so it's meticulously written in the score, which is very different than doing things by ear.
The danger of a rock band is repeating oneself. It's our greatest fear - that it evolves into the myopia of a semi-successful band that's in love with its own shadow.
In terms of the music, it feels almost like trouble's a good thing - you never know when a song is going to surprise you. We look for these subversive moments in songs.
There is much more immediate access to creative music through online communities and blogs which have touched all corners of the music world including contemporary classical.
I came from a classical background, and I was teaching and earning a living out of music at a certain level, so it's funny to make it as a rock star when we're 40 or whatever.
I grew up going to see my sister dance, both at the ballet and later as a modern dancer, and have always been a big fan of the ballet. So I have had a long relationship with dance.
For a composer of concert music, 40 is actually very young. But for a rock musician, 40 is almost past due, where you think of rock music as really part of more youth-oriented culture.
We all contribute to The National, and it's like a familiar family. Matt is dad, Brian's like the dark horse uncle, Scott's the long-suffering mum, and Aaron and I are the bratty twins.
Most of my favourite guitarists are self-taught, because in a way there's less of a reverence for the instrument itself, so you end up finding and inventing however you want to play it.
It’s important to me that people hear my music on its own merit and not in relation to another project I’ve done. Ultimately, the music has its own energy and message and stands on its own.
Me, who's educated classically, I went toward rock music 'cause it was sort of a natural evolution from where I was playing with my brother. But I was always drawn back into classical music.
I can't just play in a rock band. The National is a great, exciting band to play in. We improvise a lot onstage, and it's very intense, but after a while, I crave other kinds of experiences.
I've got this diverse education, growing up in classical music and existing between that and music that is more visceral, so for sure, I've always been interested in music from other cultures.
For many people in the music conservatory world, the message was always, Focus! 'You can't do everything; you really need to specialize.' And especially at an early age, I ignored this advice.
There are famous examples of people who just had really strange ways - [Jimi] Hendrix being the biggest example of that. Or someone like Keith Richards, he just has a really idiosyncratic style.
I think that place is a huge part of pretty much any musician's work, in how one responds to an environment, whether it be your actual surroundings or the more figurative place we're all living in.
Typically, people think, 'Oh the hippies and the punks hated each other,' or that those things don't go together musically. Sometimes that is true, but we had equal parts of both in our musical DNA.