Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My whole career began because I was always putting my music on the Internet. By the time I had my first tour, I had an audience everywhere I went, because people were listening online. I started with a website, Jasonmraz.com, pre-YouTube. You could e-mail me directly, and I would send you a CD.
I always like balance. If I'm playing rock music all the time, chances are I'll start craving some lighter, poppier stuff, both to listen to and to play. I compare music to massage. If someone's been working on your back for a long time, you really want them to move down to your legs or something.
I saw 'Rolling Stone' magazine once, and they were talking about the top 50 songs, and there wasn't one Sly song; how does that happen? But, Sly isn't the type to brown nose for props. He's always known what he had, what he was capable of; I'm just proud that he took the time and effort to put it to music.
I was always kind of against streaming, but I've been traveling so much, and I usually carry a huge hard drive of digital music with me, but I haven't had time to deal with it, so I've been doing streaming. And I had this incredible breakthrough of weightlessness where I've really been loving streaming music.
There's always so much music around me now, it seems like everything has to be something with music, so in my spare time I try not to listen to anything. It's so hard for me to listen to something without trying to see a benefit in it: 'Maybe I'll make my own version of that track or maybe I'll do this or that.'
It's always difficult to define what jazz is or what jazz isn't. To me, the only definition that I can think of is it's music where a lot of different elements are played at the same time. The harmonic, the melodic... You're pushing the boundaries on every level. That could be true of rhythm and blues as well. I'm a musician.
White artists have made millions of dollars off music they stole from black artists. I don't blame all the white artists. I'm a huge Stevie Ray Vaughn fan, and he was always very gracious about where he learned his music. But a lot of the time, you'd think the white guys thought it up. Hey, hasn't anyone heard of Muddy Waters?
I've always been a fan of instructional videos. The bass-player ones are insane. The music on them is fascinating. It's not something you hear on CDs or would really ever play in bands. You listen to it and are like, 'What is happening?' It's this blizzard of notes in weird time signatures, and they're trying to teach you that.
As a kid, I had a Beatles poster and a Bela Lugosi as Dracula poster, so both worlds always appealed to me. Horror allows you to do things as a composer than you're able to do in no other style of movie. The music has to be aggressive. You can't tiptoe around. It has to be incredibly focused dramatically - no time for second thoughts.
When I was a teenager, I really didn't like loud rock music. I listened to jazz and blues and folk music. I've always preferred acoustic music. And it was only, I suppose, by the time Jethro Tull was getting underway that we did let the music begin to have a harder edge, in particular with the electric guitar being alongside the flute.
I find just in terms of free time I'm always envious of people I know who... listen to music, watch films, play games, read books. I have to pick. And I find frequently that if I've got Sophie's Choice, I'll try to keep up with music and keep up with films. So my book reading and comic reading and game playing is terrible and infrequent.
My idea was you can't dress for the stage, you have to dress all the time like you're onstage. And so I would just always wear suits or some form of it. I wanted people to know I played music. That was kind of how you would find other people: you would just walk around looking a certain way and end up meeting someone who liked the way you look.