Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's the only way that YOUR life is gonna have any value to you. If you're just living the same life that everybody else is living what's the point?
People get comfort from music. They get joy from it and understanding from it, and most of all, the average person can't do without it in some sense.
I write in a very strange way. Things are very fragmentary for a very long time, and then they come together very quickly near the end of the process.
It may not necessarily reflect my current frame of mind. Sometimes I have to put myself at the point in time of the voice that I'm trying to sing with.
Sometimes you could tell what it was about - it was interesting - and sometimes it was quite obvious that someone had lost it and it was on an endless loop.
The New York Dolls did not think of themselves as punk rock. There was no such term at the time. They were just another band in what was called the New York scene.
I don't have a long history of hit singles of my own. I had a few, and I had a little hot streak in the '70s, but I've had a lot of success producing other people.
Recorded music has always been in a sense promotion for live performance, and some artists have discovered that giving it away is as effective as trying to sell it.
When I got out of the Nazz, I had it in my mind that simply to be eclectic was an important aspect of making music. It was something that I derived from The Beatles.
I can't stand Beyonce. The way she sells it so hard, constantly. Everything is shoved right in your face. Like, you don't have the sense to make a judgment of your own.
I don't know what the inspiration for most of songs really mean until I finish them. For the most part, I'm going for a visceral impression, and I write the words last.
It seems like there are two worlds out there - one that has revolved around 'Breaking Bad,' and then the one that I've been in, which just kind of observes it from afar.
It's great if you can afford to carry a string section on the road with you, but most people are used to the idea of just a keyboard player creating those string sounds.
If I have an opportunity to do something safe or something challenging, I'll often choose the latter. Sometimes, the objective is to submerge my viewpoint with the artist.
Аs long as I've got an audience out there to play for, I'm going to continue to play. I have at least enough people that I can go out on the road for 10, 11 weeks at a time.
The Toddstock thing is the closest thing, I have to say, a Grateful Dead sort of thing where it all lapses over from the formality of a concert into more of a lifestyle thing.
I want to be known as a professional weirdo. There aren't many Salvador Dalis or Buckminster Fullers left. If I become popular enough, I can establish the next step for records.
Sometimes being a musician has little to do with viability and everything to do with survivability. Many musicians start out great, and they wind up out of the business in 10 years.
Music gets recorded usually in one format, and when you have to take it out and perform it there are other applications and things like that that are better for the live performance.
If bearing a reputation as a weirdo is all it takes to be a genius, I'm a shoo-in. Come to think of it, half the people I know are geniuses - the other half, peculiarly enough, idiots.
It seems like a totally gratuitous myth to tell people a giant rabbit comes round at night leaving candy in a haphazard way around the house... and the cover shows the bunny caught in the act.
I've always said, rather glibly, that the message of my career has been about individualism, about getting to know yourself and taking responsibility, not just for what you do, but what you think.
Every once in a while, we have some sort of movement in music that everyone suddenly wants to work in, like grunge or rap or disco or some other musical phase, and then suddenly, that'll be the thing to do.
I certainly have a fascination with pop music as a musical form, not necessarily as a lifelong commitment. I guess you could say I'm like a Casanova of music. I can't seem to settle down with one musical form.
I'm a guitar player, really - I mean, first and foremost - I grew up with all that great 1960s music, in terms of growing up, becoming a musician, so it's like first-love stuff; I'm always going to go back to it.
I've got billions of sparrows to worry about as well as everything else'. So there's the whole idea that whatever it is that you believe, it can never be valid unless you have some consensus reality demonstration.
One Long Year was just a song here and there, and it was meant to reflect the mood that I was in but unfortunately it also reflected too little of any particular thing rather than hanging together as a whole album.
I'm not a one-hit wonder as some suggest. I've had a couple of hits, but still, all of my hits were in the '70s. There was pretty much nothing in the '80s, '90s, or in the first full decade into the next millennium.
There are some things that we know are just not as pleasant as the lies that we tell ourselves, and in that sense in order to endure existence everyone endures a certain amount of dishonesty in their everyday lives.
People got a little too self-conscious about the techniques that go into recording because sometimes, if you sing too well in tune, people accuse you of auto-tuning. It's like you have to use auto-detuning or something.
Because of the way the record business has kind of stumbled and disintegrated, in a way, you're as likely to sell records at your merch table at your gigs as you are to sell them in a regular record outlet or even online.
I never look for music by genre. I look for an artist who puts a dependable trademark on things. Like Elvis Costello - he's a great songwriter who presents his songs in a number of contexts. I feel the same about my own music.
If you're not satisfied with the way the world is, or if you think the world can be better, you have to figure out a way to know yourself and better yourself. Then you have the assurance that something in the world has improved.
I don't have the same restrictions that other people do because I never painted myself into a corner. I've always done things that didn't necessarily fit the form. I've never felt limited in that respect in terms of songwriting.
Many of us would probably not be in the music business - or never would have been in the music business - had The Beatles not demonstrated that this kind of music, or this kind of performance, was actually viable as a career alternative.
Singles needed to come back. And what I tried to do in my online experiment was to change the rules for myself and make available at a more regular pace the fruits of my labour, for people who decided they wanted to support my recordings.
It's nearly redundant to enumerate the reasons The Beatles are important. There are probably different reasons why The Beatles are important to a musician like myself and to the millions of Beatles fans who just enjoy listening to the music.
There are any number of conditions as to why your life didn't turn out the way you intended it to. My whole philosophy has always been that there is no way to change anything else in the world if you don't have the capacity to change yourself.
While I used to make my living principally as a record producer, as time went on, I had to depend more and more on my live performances because of the evolution of the record industry, which has de-emphasized what made it possible to make a living.
Most people didnt have the bandwidth to download whole albums. And so it brought back this cherry picking idea that the audience would focus on certain songs and possibly be the impetus behind what eventually got on AM radio: the single or whatever.
Most people didn't have the bandwidth to download whole albums. And so it brought back this cherry picking idea that the audience would focus on certain songs and possibly be the impetus behind what eventually got on AM radio: the single or whatever.
Music is the way I understand how to communicate now, the way that I've learned how to communicate... but it will eventually have to go beyond that. You see, I've realised that music is not what keeps people involved - it's the attitude behind the music.
I suppose people also have to be a little more careful or circumspect if they're going to leverage their celebrity to promote their political aims. The problem is that politics is about the accretion of power, and it's very difficult not to get giddy with power.
It was always remarkable to me how ignorant the labels were of the listening habits of their own customers, and how obstinate they were in denying those habits and then trying to essentially alter those habits instead of retooling their business to adapt to them.
Exploitation was rampant before statehood, and various factions actively tried to eradicate the roots of Hawaiian culture in the process of converting the natives to European religious beliefs. Some of the results can never be undone. We try to honor what is left.
Michael Jackson is a cake-and-eat-it kind of guy. He has never recognized or accepted the fact that when you shove yourself in people's face, they're not going to look just at the part you're showing them. People want to see everything that's connected to the face.
Celebrities are the fodder of much of the media business, so they're always interested in making you seem provocative when you're not, or trying to bring you some sort of embarrassment by revealing something you'd rather not have revealed. That's the downside of celebrity.
It's no longer necessary to slave over the vocals. I don't sing the lyrics until I write them, and singing is the very last thing I do. I record the entire track, and then I worry about lyrics and vocals. The music will suggest where the words are going to a certain extent.
I used to have sort of mixed feelings about a producer whose only skills seemed to be going into the studio, schmoozing the artists and making them feel good. I can see now that in some cases, that's what you have to do because that's the only way you're going to get them to produce.
The Nazz survived for 18 months - that was my first taste of fame on some level and of the overall experience of being in a band. There are good and bad aspects, and I got to taste some of both, and, well, it's not as much fun as what you see in 'A Hard Day's Night,' let me just say that.