Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Historically, musicians know what it is like to be outside the norm - walking the high wire without a safety net. Our experience is not so different from those who march to the beat of different drummers.
To be honest, I don't necessarily think you have to be an actor to act. You don't have to be a musician to make great music. If it comes along and you put your all into it, the outcome is what's important.
As a musician, we should always want to strive to be better, we can always make improvements. It's easy to get comfortable and it's easy to find your voice and your sound, but I always wanted to be better.
For Debussy the musician and the man I have had profound admiration, but by nature I'm different from him. I think I have always personally followed a direction opposed to that of the symbolism of Debussy.
It's this funny thing now: You sign up to be a musician because you want to write music, but you don't spend your time writing music. Instead, you go around the world selling the music you've already made.
Every musician that dies is the greatest ever when they die. I never heard a David Bowie record in my life. But for whatever reason, he's one of the greatest of all time now. You know why? 'Cause he's dead.
My friend Harry Belafonte is an activist and musician, an extraordinary man who has dedicated his life to human rights. He taught me the power of words and that music can be used to heal and educate people.
The bandleader is a musician trying to sell a mass commodity; and in order to do so successfully he must accommodate himself to mass standards. Unless he can do this comfortably, sooner or later he is sunk.
Neil's effect on the band was immediate and very fulfilling. He adds a certain edge to the sound and, of course, he is an incredible musician. We became a better band because of the inclusion of Neil Young.
May not music be described as the mathematics of the sense, mathematics as music of the reason? The musician feels mathematics, the mathematician thinks music: music the dream, mathematics the working life.
People be famous for everything other than music and that's what they really trying to do. But they don't know once you get famous for being this funny guy, nobody's going to take you serious as a musician.
But recently I began to feel that maybe I wouldn't be able to do what I want to do and need to do with American musicians, who are imprisoned behind these bars; music's got these bars and measures you know.
What you learn from working with other performers and musicians is invaluable, really, and can only help you grow. I mean, if you spend your whole life focusing on yourself, you're not really learning much.
We all shared an admiration of Debussy both as a musician and as sort of an icon for the 20th century. It seemed like an interesting idea to go right back 100 years to find the source of some new ideas now.
People are afraid to ask musicians to be involved in projects because they anticipate being turned down. Young artists hesitate before contacting me. People in my position don't get approached often enough.
I never minded being thought of as a pop star. People have always thought I wanted to be seen as a serious musician, but I didn't, I just wanted people to know that I was absolutely serious about pop music.
As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.
There was no way we were going to let this band hobble around on three legs. We chose the route that every professional actor, athlete and musician should do - leave the legend intact and bow out at the top.
There's not a lot of precedent for weird, bald musicians in the Lower East Side making records in their bedrooms and going on to sell a lot of copies of the record. Especially if you look at the pop climate.
My husband is a musician. He cooks and he's a chef but he also, he makes basement recordings. So many people in my life make basement recordings, so I feel very lucky, I'm surrounded by very creative people.
I love playing anyone that does stuff that I don't do. The fun of playing an assassin is that I've never killed anybody. The fun of playing a brilliant musician is that I don't actually play any instruments.
'Master Blaster,' by Stevie Wonder, is up-tempo and fun, like Stevie himself. Stevie's always making jokes; he really knows how to put people at ease. He's one of my inspirations, as a musician and a person.
I've been asked why does Ireland produce so many great musicians, and the answer is it doesn't. When you count the great musicians Ireland has given the world in the last 20 years, you can do it on one hand.
Even though I was performing all the time as an actress and I was doing all of these plays as a kid, there's a vulnerability about being a musician that you don't get [when] you perform somebody else's work.
A jazz musician is not a jazz musician when he or she is eating dinner or when he or she is with his parents or spouse or neighbors. He's above all a human being . . . the true artform is being a human being.
I think if I wasn't a musician, I would be a high-school band director or orchestra director. I like working with large groups of musicians and bringing out the dynamics and accomplishing something as a team.
I am perhaps the oldest musician in the world. I am an old man but in many senses a very young man. And this is what I want you to be, young, young all your life, and to say things to the world that are true.
I mean, just because you're a musician doesn't mean all your ideas are about music. So every once in a while I get an idea about plumbing, I get an idea about city government, and they come the way they come.
There won't ever be a mass-market record industry again, and that's fine with me because that industry didn't operate for the benefit of the musicians or the audience, the only classes of people I care about.
In most of the stuff that I've done over the years as a sideman, I wasn't really a session musician, because to me, a session musician is a guy who makes his living in the studio, and I never really did that.
Heaven answers with us the same purpose that the tuning-fork does with musicians. Our affections, the whole orchestra of them, are apt to get below the concert-pitch; and we take heaven to tune our hearts by.
It is important for the musician to learn as much about the composer as possible and to study the music he has written. Then, even a short piece by Brahms or Chopin can be played with much more understanding.
When you really do find a new idea or you're in and it's all working, that's the gift. It's like a musician when they hit a riff, that's when you're like all right, it's mellow. You back off and just ride it.
Bob Dylan is quite a songwriter, and a great singer and musician. I won't bother with comparing myself to him, but I will say that I heard his records at a very young age and I still listen to all his records.
We [musicians] are comfortable in front of the camera doing music videos, and it's almost a form of acting when we're doing music videos. We're acting out our own thoughts and what we've written down on paper.
I've never been a fearful person. When I was growing up, I wanted to be an actress, a writer, and a musician and I never really processed that those are the three hardest jobs - I just never even processed it.
Just as a musician loves music and not nightingales, and a poet loves poetry and not sunsets, a painter is not primarily a person who responds to figures and landscapes. He is primarily one who loves pictures.
Royalties are not how most writers or musicians make their living. Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales.
Many of the jazz musicians whom are no longer here. You don't realize that it's history when it is happening and then time passes and you look at a picture and you say "Wow, there is history attached to that."
There's quite an overlap between musicians - especially drummers - who have an affection and a proclivity towards comedy and comedians who fantasize about being in a band. And a lot of comics play instruments.
Today all sounds belong to a continuous field of possibilities lying within the comprehensive dominion of music. Behold the new orchestra: the sonic universe! And the musicians: anyone and anything that sounds!
First, it doesn't surprise me that traditional music has experienced a kind of exhaustion in the 20th century - not forgetting that many musicians started to look outside the traditional structures of tonality.
Maybe the idea of being a rockstar or being the one who's recording or playing, sort of doesn't really matter as much anymore, when you're surrounded by great musicians who bring their spirit, their own talent.
I've sort of had an investigatory relationship with being a musician. I really wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I felt I had had my run - I had done Jane's and I wasn't particularly interested in music anymore.
But I've always liked to be the kind of drummer and musician who likes to go outside of what's expected of me, and I've always been able to do more than you necessarily hear with every band I've ever played in.
Because I have sixty years of being a professional composer, conductor, musician, whatever, and you develop a lot of friendships and you get involved with a lot of sort of long-term commitments and obligations.
The greatest thing about doing this movie was that Chris and I both were involved in folk music in the '60s. I had a group, but I don't think it was at the same level as Chris, because he's an amazing musician.
My husband, Gabriele, is a musician, and I love music, so you can bet it's a really important part of our home entertaining repertoire, even if it means Gabriele making a really good playlist for a dinner party.
Ultimately, what we do as musicians, I think of us as a type of emotional engineer. We essential take these sound waves, this sound, and we organize it into emotion, and that's how we connect with our audiences.