Quotes About Music

What happened in the '70s was albums and concerts began making a hell of a lot more money, and then the suits got involved.

I know for me, music was the best drug for anxiety. So that's why I wanted to write the music that I do, because it always suits my anxiety. It's a huge part of my life, and being able to make music that can help people with their anxiety is a huge thing for me.

So pretty much, to sum it up, if you can freak someone out and bring that kind of emotion out of somebody with a song, you're doing something right.

I had a guitar when I was 6 or 7, a plastic guitar with the Beatles' faces on it. It would be a collector's item now. It would fetch a hefty sum, I imagine.

To outsiders it probably seems like splitting hairs, but to me, Bright Eyes is a simply the collaboration between myself and Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott. What you hear is definitely the sum of all our ideas and represents all three of us. But I still write the songs myself.

All I'm really interested in musically is trying to make concept albums. Serving a larger sum than the parts.

I was raised on 'TRL' and listened to every genre that sounded good to me, from Sum 41 to Jay Z to Band of Horses to J. Dilla to Deathcab for Cutie to Pharrell.

Get to the point where the songs sum it all up, and creatively, I'm just like, 'This is it.' I've also learned how to be patient and not really try to overproduce anymore. I used to add instruments, keep adding instruments, but nowadays - I know better now. I know how to let the track breathe.

In a studio context, the music becomes greater than the sum of its parts. When you have collaboration, you have other people's strengths that I don't share, so my song can get stronger.

Steve Allen was on Johnny Carson one time - I looked for it, but I couldn't find it - and he read the lyrics to 'Hot Stuff' by Donna Summer like a poet. He read them very seriously. I was maybe 8, but it killed me.

Music scores your life. You interact with it. You listen to it in the car. It becomes the soundtrack to that one summer with that one girl.

When I was 16 I told my dad I wanted to be a pop star. He told me, 'I'll give you until the end of the summer. If you're not earning money by then, you're going back to school.'

I love Donna Summer, and I love ABBA. I love late '70s disco. I love the Bee Gees. I just love that period of recording.

I hitched up to Haight-Ashbury in the Summer of Love, you know? And I was very much politically aligned with that whole mentality, the whole ideology of that generation, the music, the culture, the behavior.

Now, I was the Summer Concert guy. I played every Summer concert there was.

So, when I was eight or nine my mom's friend gave her a big purple bag full of cassettes and I found Seals and Crofts' 'Summer Breeze'... When I found it I stopped going through the bag because I was like, well, I'm not going to find anything better than this. I just thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard.

I once sang 'Summer Nights,' from 'Grease,' at a bar in Melbourne with John Travolta, who's a good friend of mine. He looked cool singing the part of Danny - sitting in an armchair, smoking a cigar - while I got stuck playing Sandy.

One summer I remember, I got exposed to Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly and Buddy Holly was a very very big, made a very big impression on me. Because of a lot of things, you know, the way he looked and his charisma.

I spent many a summer early morning with the radio very low, half sleeping and half listening.

Nothing says summer to me more than Notting Hill Carnival.

I could name a few songs and say exactly what summer they came out and what boy I thought I was in love with when I was fourteen years old, but I think that music used to be really more a part of the culture when people went out dancing in a different way than they do now.

There is absolutely no doubt that the extraordinary Donna Summer belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Edinburgh has a similar climate to Bergen - it's very rainy and grey. There were a lot of days I'd sit inside in front of the computer, make music, and dream about summer - instead of the rainy reality outside.

I spent the summer of '88 indoors, writing 'Shoot You Down,' 'Bye Bye Badman,' and 'Don't Stop.'