Quotes About Music

I had a boom box, but I didn't go too far with it because I had a really, really big one. It was like the size of a suitcase, and I was just a little kid.

Back in the day, in '91 or so, I tried to interview Fugazi for Rolling Stone, which the band felt stood for everything they detested about corporate infiltration of music. They said, 'We'll do the interview if you give us a million dollars of cash in a suitcase.' Which was their way of saying no.

Two songs I like are 'High Flying Adored' and 'Another Suitcase Another Hall,' both from 'Evita.'

There's been this argument about Coldplay stealing this melody from Joe Satriani, but, if you listen to it, it's mine! It's the 'Foreigner Suite,' it is!

We did do the whole of the live suite from 'Fly From Here,' and that was very enjoyable to do. In fact, that is actually our longest piece of music, I think, that we'd ever done.

The thing with R Kelly was, he liked to record late at night, around midnight. And what was different with his studio was that one room had a recording suite, and next door was a club, with 40 or 50 people dancing.

Without getting real personal, we liked our bass player Ed. He was a great guy and he was a good bass player but his playing was suited for a different style of band.

I wasn't planning on being a guitar player; I was going to be a singer. And I was for a little bit in the Sex Pistols - that is, until we got John Lydon. And then I realized I wasn't really suited as a front guy.

It was immaterial to me that Elvis didn't write his own songs. Those were very different days, and he selected whatever suited him best from material supplied by publishing houses and teams of writers - all of whom were extremely conscious of his style of delivery.

I have been told that my voice is very suited to oldies albums.

I've recorded a few Bacharach songs over the years and performed some in concert and always felt they suited me.

Most of my songs are based off poetry, but I mainly write to write. I never know which form the words are best suited to until I hear an instrumental.

Before I was rapping, I was always around the rap game, even though I was in the streets. I would be at all the parties and all the events, and I was pretty hard to miss. I was one of the few Spanish cats sitting there with jewelry on, Dapper Dan suits. It was pretty hard to miss me.

In bachata, you had these guys that used to wear suits and had a really traditional style. We looked different. Baggy jeans. We had the Spanglish going on, and I knew that was going to work to our advantage.

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.

I usually go to secondhand stores and find what I can. I like finding interesting things: vests, blazers. I tell the band, 'We got to look good when we're up there.' I learned it from Miles Davis. I read about his suits in his biography. Suits mean you're getting paid, and I like the idea that he looked good in his suits.

Make no mistake about it: once a band has signed a letter of intent, they will either eventually sign a contract that suits the label or they will be destroyed.

The first band I saw were Mike Sheridan and The Nightriders, in their brown mohair suits, in 1966.

I've bought clothes based on record covers. Particularly from the formative music that turned me onto it in the first place when I was a kid, with the Beatles and the Small Faces. A lot of those Sixties soul artists were in really sharp sharkskin or mohair suits, and Motown artists looked amazing.

The Sixties was all about style and a certain look. But what was interesting about 1963 was that it was pre-Beatles, so the clothes of that time, especially the suits, were very different from the clothes post-Beatlemania.

I'm not this bright-eyed 17-year-old that got signed to a label and is listening to all these suits tell them the best plan of action.

I had just discovered jazz, and I started singing in a kind of blues cover band at the age of 15. We called ourselves - it was a terrible name - the Blue Zoots. We couldn't actually get our hands on zoot suits, nor did we dress in blue. We did covers of Screamin' Jay Hawkins and kind of Blues Brothers repertoire stuff.

Some people ask me what instruments I play, but usually I'll just say I'm more of a producer or a composer or songwriter - those are my strongest suits: arranging and composing.

Somehow, my music really suits doctors making out in the syringe room.