Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You can radically change a person's life with a tune. I don't think people truly understand or appreciate how powerful that is.
My thing is, I've yet to meet a well person. The spectrum is unbelievably wide, the triggers for depression and manic depression.
Creativity, for me, is almost like therapy; my songs take you into the underbelly of my mind, and there's some dark stuff in there.
People wanted me to become this cliched Keith Richards, Iggy Pop character. I wasn't expected to marry a beautiful wife and have kids.
If Sinatra had packed in his style because there were a load of counterfeit Sinatras about, he would have stopped singing in 1956 or whatever.
I'm very interested in Darwinism and how that affects us on a day-to-day level. But I also have a deep interest in theology and the spiritual.
The Richard Ashcroft of 1992 would have struggled to imagine the path my life has taken - he would be amazed at the changes in my song writing.
Life's about ego. So for someone to talk about my ego, as they are writing their piece about my ego, I'm wondering what they're doing with their ego?
Just because something's kinda indie and whatever and only a few people know it, it doesn't give it more authenticity over Rihanna's 'Work' work work.
Ed Sheeran? I don't like the fact he gets a lot of stick. I like the fact he works hard, and God knows how much money he pays to the tax man each year.
A classic song is timeless. You'll never outlive a classic song. I'll never put The Beatles 'In My Life' on one day and say, 'That doesnt move me any more.'
Really, I listen to more hip hop probably than most other things. That's where I get a lot of my influence from because it's so eclectic. So that's what I love.
The mad thing is, most of my life, when I'm not in a dark mood, it's been humour that's got me through. The only way to get through this business is by laughing.
Not many people come out of a big band as the lead singer/songwriter and making a record, and all of a sudden we're all happily sailing at the same pace as we were before.
I love sportsmen's spirit, their ability to come back and override negativity. Michael Owen has been written off so many times, but he will always prove the doubters wrong.
I've always felt like an outsider in this industry, but that sense of community - that sense of belonging with your fans - it's an amazing feeling, and it's really inspiring.
Obviously, aging has a certain amount of mellowing process because there's certain things you realise you were doing when you were younger that were plain ridiculous, stupid.
If you start shaping everything you do trying to be in step with whatever is going on in the world, you're often out of step by the time people hear it. It's a bit like fashion.
Even if you're not releasing songs, the act of creativity is important. That's the part I love, when you're in the moment. The rest of it I'm not particularly interested in at all.
Technology means the kind of music you can make on your own if you've got an imagination is amazing. It's crazy that I can sit with a Mac and a keyboard and a mic and create a symphony.
My job is to make grown men cry, to blow people's minds and elevate them, make them transcend and unlock emotions that have been repressed by life, their job, situation - that's what I do.
Ultimately, if someone's paying hard-earned money to see me play live, they don't want a rant about what's happening on the other side of the world. They don't want to know which way they should vote.
I was always going to be vulnerable when I left the Verve. It was a hardening experience for me. People saw me stripped down and decided to have their shot. I suppose they wanted to take me down a peg.
When I read about Gram Parsons' dream of this Cosmic American Music when I was in my late teens, that stuck with me: that idea, that ambition, to draw off the roots of music but take it somewhere fresh.
You can find the greatest sound of all time, and someone's going to squash it down to a tiny little earphone anyway or play it through the computer, and that is a big thing people have to think about now.
It's difficult to be the spokesperson for something that internally is falling apart. That's a tremendous amount of pressure to put on one person, to be the guy who gives all the quotes, all the interviews.
You know, rock n' roll's an old carcass: it's one big cliche. It's so difficult to do anything that has any sense of freshness or vitality or meaning. But that's what I'm trying to do, to give it new meaning.
I lost a good friend a few years ago, and it happened quite suddenly. Any event like that leaves you with questions. Would a phone call have made a difference? Did the person know that you were there for them?
There's a track called 'Why Not Nothing' about how the world's turning so conservative and so religious at the same time. I think it's up to the songwriters to give another side to the coin, and my music does that.
If I was a painter, I would have hundreds of finished and unfinished canvases in my studio waiting for people to see, and it is the same with my music. I've got so many pieces of music and songs waiting to be heard.
Without music and creativity, I'd need other forms of therapy. But for me, the life process is the process of healing yourself. 'Break the Night' is about offering hope to people, about breaking through the darkness.
We all have our daily prescription of yoga, football, religion, or whatever gets us through that day. My thing is music. It's the only thing that gives me a sense of calm and balance. It's the thing I know I'm good at.
To build public support for what they're doing, scientists are always going to say there is the prospect to cure all these horrible diseases, but they're cautious for the most part in saying when those cures will arrive.
Hearing 'This Is How It Feels' on the radio was an amazing feeling, like starting again. But I believe that, in the end, my name will be bigger then the Verve because of all those great tunes and the power of what I stand for.
I'm very lucky that I can walk on the stage before anyone in the world. And that's the thing: you've got to be pretty confident to go on after me. You've got to have the artillery, as I call it. And the artillery is your songs.
I don't know if I have a problem expressing joy, but the difficulty is in making an album, a piece of music that really does reflect life rather than the one dimension. I have a problem in trying to make a complete trip record.
Come back down to basics. The basic things of life, the basic things for me are the things that turn me on more than anything. I'm actually trying to go back from where I was running from...the more essential things that I was ignoring.
Criticism is beyond your control and is a collective group of people deciding things about you that may or may not be true. Some critics look for more when there's no need to. They have a dotto-dot picture of me they are intent on filling in.
I'm totally up for experimental music. I'm up for music that they don't play on the radio, and I take in all of it. But my thing, the thing that comes most natural to me, is making the stuff that has a melody; it has a soul to it, yet it's head music.
At The Verve's first-ever gig, I said that we were gonna blow this local band off the stage. It was only in the local Wigan paper, and they rang me to ask why I was being so aggressive. I just went, 'Hey man, it's like boxing. I'm just trying to sell a ticket.'
I don't want to be responsible for messing up someone. I don't want to be responsible for that, because the things that happened in The Verve, it was heavy stuff. It was real. It wasn't just frivolous nonsense, you know what I mean? There was real people's lives.
I'm one of those people. I can be sold by the candy in life, and then it can be stripped away within a split second and I feel like I've seen too much. And that's the way, I've been like that most of my life, so I could never say I was there yet in any stretch of the imagination.
Any true musician, true artist, knows that when they're in that point of total artistic creation, whether on stage or in the studio or writing or whatever, that's the closest moment [to creation]. And that's what keeps all these people addicted to getting back to that moment again.
With 'Break The Night,' each verse is saying, 'Nothing's going right today; nothing ever does.' It's about that kind of repetition, it's that kind of mantra you can get in your mind when you're depressed or down, when it's become like a hamster on a wheel - it's very difficult to break.
The Grime guys have kind of rewritten the blueprint for people as far as creativity, songwriting, ownership, doing your own videos... So they're sending out a real positive message I think to people, that you can do it yourself in a punk way, and you can still potentially be successful and get to people.
I can't pin myself on any fixed religion, really. I'm just one of those sad, early-century people who just drifts around and picks up a bit of this and a bit of that. I was confirmed a Christian when I was a kid purely because I wanted a piece of jewelry, so I don't know whether this is just another extension of that.
We'd lie on the floor, turn the lights out, put two speakers on either side of our ears, and try to blow our minds with music. I know that I want to make a record that does that yet a record that, if it was played on the radio at twelve in the afternoon, the guy making the wall - the guy cleaning the motorway - he's got a melody to hang on.
When you're in doubt about the future and you're in doubt about how solid this thing is that you're laying your life and your soul on the line for, you will probably retract into yourself a little bit and think, No, there's only so much I can give to something that everyone doesn't believe in. There's been chipping away, people have been chipping away at it, so it's just you in the spotlight in front of all these people.