Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Instruments of a trade are really fascinating to me. Things that enable you to do your job better. Rehabbing houses is really fun to me. I love taking a space and seeing the potential, gutting it, and putting it back together and I love the tools used to do that.
Choices can change our lives profoundly. The choice to mend a broken relationship, to say "yes" to a difficult assignment, to lay aside some important work to play with a child, to visit some forgotten person - these small choices may affect many lives eternally.
It's a social media time, where you have YouTube and everything it's kind of like you see my career grow up on camera. But a lot of the things that you would see from artists would be behind the scenes that nobody would know about before, now it's all on display.
I had these glorified ideas about San Francisco and its drug culture - I thought inspiration would just hit me and I would get these San Francisco drugs in my system and all of a sudden an amazing record would come out. But that's not really what happened at all.
Jesus is infinite. he does not finish. there is no start time for Jesus. he has always existed and will always exist. and his love for us is vaster than we are able to comprehend...And i have to remind myself that God is not 30 minutes of accessible group singing.
Progression is important. I'm always going to play music in the general vein of rock'n'roll, but when I started I was very much associated with the West Coast lo-fi thing and I didn't want to get anchored in with anything that was just in vogue for the time being.
America is the land of the hustler: it's bigger, bolder, flasher, more in your face, whereas England's more about attention to detail - trying to be refined and classy, and I think a lot of people in the urban scene in this country have had trouble accepting that.
It’s time to write dangerous music. It’s time to take risks. It’s time to wear your heart on your sleeve, and sing about the things that actually matter to you. It’s time to bury the shackles of religious expectation and stop trying to put new clothes on the dead.
There is a town in north Ontario, With dream comfort memory to spare, And in my mind I still need a place to go, All my changes were there. Blue, blue windows behind the stars, Yellow moon on the rise, Big birds flying across the sky, Throwing shadows on our eyes.
I had a year of therapy and I swear to God, I went in that with a certain level of self-love, but not enough to keep me out of bad relationships, not enough to try and save people who were toxic for me, not enough to recognise when something was bad, to walk away.
I did take guitar lessons as a teenager, though, and I started to teach myself how to play everything I could play on the guitar on piano, so I had a really weird, non-traditional route to proficiency. I think it probably helped me come at things from a new angle.
I would say I was a little bit outgoing, a little bit shy. I was definitely much more shy than my brother. I was young - age six. I was really drawn to music because my brother started playing instruments and I wanted to be at his level, even though I was younger.
The more alone I am, the more focused I can get. I've written things with people, some of which I liked and others I think are total travesties. Collaborating is trying to make a piece of music and get someone else to come up with the ideas. What's the fun of that?
Being an opener is easy because fans aren't expecting anything. However, when you go up there and blow their minds and they flip out that is such an unbelievable feeling, so you want to make sure you bring your everything, every single night to ensure that happens.
When ABBA broke up, I assumed our music would fall into oblivion so in the early 90's with BJRN AGAIN becoming popular and when U2 invited Benny and I on stage to sing Dancing Queen, I just assumed we were being sent up. But now I see they were paying tribute to us
I hated Shallow Grave, that movie made me angry. And I hated Happiness. I generally hate movies that use extreme violence or gratuitous shock value in place of having a heart. For example: movies that combine extremely sadistic violence with humor I find offensive.
The responsibility of caring and providing for a child can both give you strength or be paralyzing at times. Depending on the attitude you choose. Ultimately I think it is very valuable to anyone's personal growth having to care for someone else than just yourself.
We constantly try to change and stay fresh. We've done a lot of different styles of music: R&B, hip-hop, rock, orchestral. So when people hear us doing a rock'n'roll record or a movie like "Dreamgirls," they'll say, "Hey, that doesn't sound like an Underdogs sound."
Like all sports fans, tennis junkies are not satisfied with simply following the current crop of players and admiring their accomplishments. They seemingly always need to compare players of different eras and designate one of them as the greatest player of all time.
At the end of the day, what people want from me is to get up there on that stage and make them feel powerful and give them a release for an hour and a half or two hours every once in a while. And if I'm still able to do that, hopefully I'm still making people happy.
I think business has to be stupider. I want to do really straightforward, stupid business - just talk to me like a 4-year-old. And I refuse to negotiate. I do not negotiate. I can collaborate. But I'm an artist, so as soon as you negotiate, you're being compromised.
I just started to understand my craft, what I wanted to do as an artist. It's just a growing process. Figuring out exactly what I wanted to do and obviously I toured a whole bunch. I did a lot of song writing for other people and then just settled back into my zone.
I think I initially started inventing characters in my songs because I didn't want to write directly about myself. Also, as a kid, I loved all the character names in Beatles songs, like Eleanor Rigby and Lovely Rita and Mean Mr. Mustard and Maxwell and Rocky Raccoon.
And I can't even go to the grocery store without some ones that's clean and a shirt with a team/It seems we living the American dream but people highest up got the lowest self esteem/The prettiest people do the ugliest things for the road to riches and diamond rings.
I don't know that I read more than the average person. I don't think I do very much. I tend to read more when I'm on holiday. That's when I can go through books like you wouldn't believe. I read a bit of everything, but the novel has always been very important to me.
It's so important, after a song is finished, to go to sleep and listen to the song with fresh ears the next day. It's sometimes a traumatic event. And playing it for someone else for the first time - that is the most nerve-wracking thing of all. But we learn so much.
I definitely straddled the line and hung out with high-school dirtbags. I'd tell my parents I was spending the night at my friend's but actually go to Philly and see a show at Starlight Ballroom. I would drink and do all that stuff, but I didn't set any barns on fire.
I'm compelled to paint nearly every day. I just felt like making a painting, went out and bought paints and a canvas. Now it fulfills me creatively when I'm not doing music: it's something you can do by yourself and it's totally yours. It's a great adjunct to my life.
I kind of talk about songwriting in the sense that it's really not my job to try to state hard truths. I'm not out to say this is what truth is, this is what's false, this is reality, this is not reality. What I prefer is to try to create a space where truth can move.
A lot of festivals can be a jumble of electronic music and rock and roll, and everything's all mixed up - some things are more performance art or light shows or dance parties, and then you'll have a singer-songwriter stuck in the middle to make the changeovers easier.
I worked a telemarketing job. I always worked those because I always knew how to talk to people and I always knew how to sell because my father was a salesman. He used to sell vacuum cleaners, payroll services to companies, so that was natural for me to go into sales.
There's something about Saint Francis's approach to life, zero expectations but pleasant surprise. In a lot of ways he was a really conflicted person. Some people would say he's masochistic . I don't really know, but I've always loved his reverence and his mindfulness.
I always wanted to be a musician from when I was kid. It was always a massive dream of mine. School was also really really important to me and having an education was top of my priority. So I really wanted to have a degree before I tried anything in the music industry.
Most people who ask me what's my favorite song, expect that it's 'Midnight Train' or 'Neither One of Us.' But actually, it's always kinda been 'The Need to Be' because of what it says. I love the way that song was written, I love the melody, I love everything about it.
Sia is like no one else I've ever worked with. She comes completely from this non-logical but very emotional place. I could be wrong, but she doesn't really seem to analyse what she's writing. She doesn't really revise it, but goes with that first thing that comes out.
When you're talking about truth and love, you can wield your profession, your craft, in a way that hurts people because you're so good, and so when someone can present it in a way that is inviting people into their joy, that's when the most beautiful things are formed.
England was always very special. It was so important because the reason Benny and I started writing was the Beatles. During the Sixties, England was everything. To be number one in England was more important than being number one in America because England set the tone.
I don't understand why they trippin', If you ask me, Flow is just as nice as, I admit the propane, I just spit, probably, Just raise the gas prices, Everybody in the club, Try and get as fresh as me, What you want dog, Trying to stay recession free, And spit, refreshly.
Nothing is plainer than that, if the principles of the church of Rome prevail here, our Constitution would fall. The two cannot exist together. They are in open and direct antagonism with the fundamental theory of our government and of all popular government everywhere.
Culture dictated from above is the enemy of folk music. Whether it's stuffy classical music or pre-engineered pop where somebody's paid tons of money to make sure that everyone hears this song a certain number of times a day - that feels like the opposite of folk music.
What makes you a rock star is what are you able to do when you get behind that microphone, when you put that guitar in your hands, when you wield those drumsticks, and when you raise your hand in front of twenty thousand people: do they respond? That's being a rock star.
Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming We're finally on our own This summer I hear the drumming Four dead in Ohio Gotta get down to it Soldiers are gunning us down Should have been done long ago What if you knew her and Found her dead on the ground How can you run when you know
When I am onstage, singing all these songs... what's going through my mind is nothing. That's what's so amazing about meditation - achieving that state, getting to a place where you're clear and present. I'm not thinking about anything except connecting with an audience.
We were called 'Three Men Who, When Standing Side by Side, Have a Wingspan of Over Twelve Feet.' We had that name for a week or so. We were also called 'Are You My Mother?' for awhile. We went through a lot of really dumb band names - almost as dumb as Fountains of Wayne.
We never enter the studio unless we feel like, right now, if these are the songs we record, that we would have an album that we're proud of and we're excited about. And we put everything under the microscope and examine it the best we can to make sure that we're prepared.
You got to understand, Arthur Alexander was there with us, and some of his crew. It was in the '50s in Alabama. It was before even the civil rights stuff even started. You can imagine the hatred, although we didn't have it as bad as other parts of the country, I must say.
Ultimately, the disconnect with the earth we have going relates to a deeper sickness of losing touch with our souls, our bodies, our communities. The collective stories about what is happening need to change. We need to reclaim a sense that we have a say in how things go.
You know, when I was a kid waiting on the bus, I remember that was when I imagined my life. I imagined everything that I was gonna be when I grew up and I imagined all of these amazing journeys and amazing people Id meet. Of course, all of it has kind of come to fruition.
I've not worn a dress since about 1985. It always amazes me how there is still a fascination for it in England. The rest of the world doesn't seem to care. I'm not sure whether they don't remember or whether they've just moved on from it. I was brought up in the glam era.
In my life I have had various health threats: polio, seizures, a brain aneurysm. None of these things has really changed me much, although it is hard to say for sure. These are events that are part of my life. They make me who I am. I am thankful for them. They are scary.