Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think Don Henley is a brilliant contemporary rock writer. He would have been a fabulous poet if he weren't a musician. He was a literary major, and not only that - he's gifted with a brilliant voice. To me, Don could sing the New York City Yellow Pages and I'd buy it. I just love the sound of his voice.
If you're a woman musician, that is your qualifier. I've had people come up to me and say, "You're good for a girl." My only issue is, when that stereotype and stigma already exists, sometimes it's perpetuated by people who may not really play guitar. You somehow need to transcend that division of gender.
Because of social media, a lot of people think they can be, like, a rapper or a singer or a musician because they can put something on YouTube and it might become a thing because there's - like - YouTube phenomenons and whatnot, you know? It's not like they dedicated years to it or anything. It's annoying.
Like the ability of all the musicians to end the song at the right time. Or when it's time for a chord change, but nobody knows what the chord should be, and you all, you know, it all just changes, magically, at the same time. It's when you pick up your phone to call someone and that person is calling you.
Every time we give a musician the advice to give away the music and sell the T-shirt, we're saying, 'Don't make your living in this more elevated way. Instead, reverse this social progress, and choose a more physical way to make a living.' We're sending them to peasanthood, very much like the Maoists have.
As a filmmaker, like any artist, when something affects me emotionally I think about it in those terms. It's my way of dealing with my thoughts, my fears and my hardships. I think the same can be said with any artist. For a musician, you're going to write a song about something that affects you emotionally.
I first came to London as a musician, and when my group broke up, I did 'Guys and Dolls' at the Watford Palace theatre. After that, Ned Sherrin found me and brought me to the West End to do one of his shows. The work went from strength to strength, so I thought: 'This is where the world wants me; I'll stay.
If you go to a concert, you will notice, is it loud? Is the music fast? Is it predominately strings or brass? There are things we can all register, whether we are musicians or not. Painting's no different. Taking pleasure in projecting oneself into the painting is the act of looking. That's what looking is.
When I did the Abyssinian mass, I went through the whole history of the church music and the gospel music, even with the Anglo American hymns, the Afro American hymns, the spirituals and how it developed, up to Thomas Dorsey and the Dixie Hummingbirds, going through the history of the music, jazz musicians.
A lot of musicians have said things to me like, "Music saved my life". And "I'm standing on the shoulders of dozens of people that you've never heard of that were like angels for me that came out of the woodwork." And that's really the case for me. I had so many people that did those kinds of things for me.
I criticized the whole American songwriting industry and the pop side of it and I was bitter about it. And I stepped back and thought 'Why are you bitter? You can't just stand there like every other indie musician and criticize this so-called 'generic' music when you're not doing anything to challenge that.'
I first came to London as a musician, and when my group broke up, I did 'Guys and Dolls' at the Watford Palace theatre. After that, Ned Sherrin found me and brought me to the West End to do one of his shows. The work went from strength to strength, so I thought: 'This is where the world wants me; I'll stay.'
I’m not saying that maybe there isn’t a kid out there whose behavior hasn’t been influenced by me in some way. I’m sure there is. But I can only speak for myself, and if you’d asked if my behavior had ever been affected by people I’d admired from afar, like musicians or footballers, that’d be a yes, totally.
Interestingly, I matured as a musician and as an artist before I matured as a man. What I mean by that is, I was ready to be completely vulnerable and honest with myself and unapologetic when it comes to how I express myself in my medium. But I wasn't as secure in doing that when it came to just being myself.
What's funny about the slacker thing, people project an image of what they think a musician is: young, slack, unemployed - like a really romantic idea of a poet, writer or musician - which isn't really true a lot of the time. I don't reckon you would know anything about me if I wasn't moderately hard-working.
I get the most starstruck around musicians. I get tongue-tied and don't know what to say. I'm so jealous of them. When you make a movie, you're constructing something - it's a little bit like making an album. But after musicians make an album, they get to perform it live and experience it in front of a crowd.
My thing with New York was that it felt so insular. When I went to L.A., everybody I knew was a cool, amazing musician. In New York, they'd be hunkered down trying to form a band. But in L.A., guys in bands were also playing with other artists, touring with other artists, and collaborating with other artists.
In my own life I studied music, not creative writing; I see a novel as music - an opening as an overture, themes and subplots as lines in a fugue. The chance to write a novel about a musician boxed in by all kinds of limitations but who plays out his ultimate struggle for freedom at the piano was irresistible.
It's much easier to have a diversified career as an electronic musician than it is as a drummer. Nothing against drummers. If you're a drummer, you just wait around for people to ask you to play drums. But if you have your own studio and can make music, you have the ability to approach music a lot differently.
One of the reasons I moved away from painting was because I eventually discovered that I wanted to deal more with motion, time, and performance - and that became a much bigger part of my life both as an actor and as a musician and someone who goes on stage and travels around the world and works on productions.
Why a musician loves playing jazz or classical music or what makes them happy, and why an artist likes to paint - it's so hard to actually put into words what that feeling is of joy that we get, but that is what I get: a feeling of joy when the camera is rolling, even if I'm doing something that is not joyous.
I've done an incredible amount of painters. It's an area, for me, where there's more mystery left. I've photographed so many musicians, I've been in studios so often, I know the whole process. The mystery's gone from it. I think it's important to keep mystery into our lives. There's a longing connected with it.
So I've tried to be this very eccentric character, and that works very well if you want to be a painter which I did once upon a time, if you want to be a musician which I did once upon a time. But if you want to make movies and you want to make challenging movies, you've got to be the sanest person in the room.
Drag is great way to get people to pay attention to me, but it's a difficult way to get people to take me seriously as a musician. So it's a weird Catch-22. It's like a gimmick that gets them to pay attention, but when they see my image, they're like, 'There's no way this is going to have any legitimacy to it.'
Poetry itself is music. I'm just lucky that I can convert it into music. William Blake is my favorite poet of all time, and he said that he wasn't quite familiar with the sounds of music. If so, he would have been a musician. All of his poems are all like songs, and that's how I always try to start my thoughts.
I'm an untrained musician. Untrained musicians don't really have any music theory, they don't have a lot of rules. We break the rules, but it's mostly because we don't know what the rules are. It's easy for us to go to certain places, so I'm not surprised that a lot of people were amused by my songwriting style.
When I started making films I just decided "I'm the filmmaking equivalent of a garage band and I'll just make my garage band movies." But even the same musicians from garage bands would go to my movies and you could tell what they liked from the way that they dressed and they would be the first ones to walk out.
This great Mughal Emperor [Akbar] was illiterate; he could neither read nor write. However, that had not stopped Akbar from cultivating the acquaintance of the most learned and cultured poets, authors, musicians, and architects of the time - relying solely on his remarkable memory during conversations with them.
The perception that I was just a pop star was pushed upon me by the public, and it's very hard to change the public's perception even though I never really pushed aside the musician aspect of my career. After I released 'Fingerprints,' my peers reassured me that I was on a level that I always hoped I would be on.
I wasn't really that good at being a musician. And then I tried being a standup. I was an actor. I was a photographer. I tried everything. Nothing was particularly working for me, but then, as a musician, I wrote jokes for comics. And they started to buy my jokes, and that's where I thought maybe that might work.
I started playing music around 13 or 14, played jazz in high school, and played other stuff in college. After college, I tried to make it as a musician. I lived in a big squalid house full of dudes outside of Boston. We were all musicians. We built this studio in the basement and played there all hours of the day.
I dream of a collaboration that will become so complete that, often, the poet will think as musician and the musician as poet, so that the work resulting from this union will not be the random conclusion of a series of approximations and concessions, but the harmonious synthesis of two aspects of the same thought.
It's really interesting to just look at the career of a musician and a producer that went into many different genres and many different styles and many different places but always breaking the barriers between genres and at some point reinventing himself all along the way but also inventing things at the same time.
When I grew up, the thing boys would do during the summer is work tobacco because it was a cheap product back then. I didn't want to do that. From an early, early, early age, I was like, 'I like music. This performing thing comes easy.' And perhaps that's how I ended up doing what I'm doing today. Being a musician.
You need to know what makes artists tick. Having been through the process myself as a musician, since I was an early teen, gave me an advantage - understanding them from their point of view, because it's about them, it's not about you - it's their vision and what they're capable of achieving, and you're the conduit.
Why the connection with musicians? I think it's because in the end we're doing very similar things - we're telling stories, we're using poetic, lyrical language, and we're distilling stories down into their simplest form. We're both telling a story in two languages - word and music for them; and word and image for me.
I think maybe people see bands and musicians as some sort of superhero unrealistic sport that happens in another dimension where it's not real people and not real emotions. So, I grew up listening to Beatles records on my floor. That's how I learned how to play guitar. If it weren't for them, I wouldn't be a musician.
You listen to Bob Dylan and you can't help but think of the 60s, it's very relational and if artists are true artists and not just mere musicians they need to be truthful because the music doesn't come from them, it comes from the universe and it's to be shared. At best, we're skilled presenters, and I say that at best.
I work with musicians whose opinions I respect and if they don't like something they don't hold back. They'll say, 'That really sucks' and 'You've lost it' and 'You're no good anymore.' And I crawl away with my tail between my legs and I fear that kind of ridicule, but I want them to like the music I'm bringing to them.
Overall, I think the main thing a musician would like to do is give to the listener the many wonderful things he knows of and senses in the universe... That's what I would like to do. I think that's one of the greatest things you can do in life, and we all try to do that in some way. The musician's is through his music.
I think it's quite tricky for actors to release albums. It's difficult, because I'm an actor, you know, I'm not a musician. I love singing, but I don't have a big repertoire of songs that I've written; I mean, I've got a few, but nothing that I could fill an album with, and I don't want to do it just for the sake of it.
Everybody goes up and does something in the private sector that they feel that they can do, and obviously I'm a musician and feel that one of my experiments - because I think there are many that you can do and that you're helped with the ideas of what you could do - yes, would be to see how I would sing in zero gravity.
I don't know if One Direction will stand the test of time. I have a niece who goes crazy for them. But the only way to judge art is to wait and see if it becomes evergreen. This takes a bit of time. Adele is a very good musician and I'd like to sing with her. But, again, time will tell if her music will become evergreen.
My sister and I - she's a musician - we jam all the time. We always play around for giggles with stuff that seem unconventional or stuff that seems funny. A lot of the stuff sometimes is just a response from jam sessions in her room, so she'll be on the guitar or the keyboard, and we'll just start singing and doing stuff.
An actor and a [theatre] director are both what I would call interpreters of work. We interpret a work, just as a musician will interpret a composer's work, we interpret the work of a playwright. We are servants of the theatre and I've always believed that. We must serve what has been written, that's what we're there for.
The Ramones couldn't play in my key. They couldn't switch keys, so Ed Stasium literally had to play all the instruments for my version of "Rock 'N' Roll High School," and I always thought that was so weird, because it's not the Ramones playing. It's the producer, who happened to just be a musician and could play everything.
I spent two years figuring out how I could turn it into something that would satisfy me as a musician but also make some kind of cross-cultural link. I feel that I kind of at least touched on the possibilities of cross-cultural music, but it is a lifetime's work, and I don't profess to be anything other than a novice at it.
I personally see myself as a musician in the first place. You know, I don't want to say I will be a producer and DJ for the rest of my life. I can totally see myself being in another band in five years, if that's what my heart and soul wants to do, if that's what will make me happy. I'm totally happy to just not DJ anymore.
I think the reason being Ravi Shankar's daughter is not such a pressure to me is that I don't look at myself in that way. Of course, he's the best-known Indian musician there is so, people naturally look to me as the next one, but the truth is there are many other musicians out there as well as other students of my father's.