Quotes About Music

Whenever you write music, you want it to touch people on a certain level. I mean, I've been reading tweets about 'Troublemaker' and people saying 'OMG, I can so relate to this - this is a guy that I fancy, or a girl that I fancy; it's exactly like this person.'

I think, having done 'The Princess Diaries,' it was a fun experience, and it's cool to have made fans that are now into all this music. That movie is still so relevant to our culture. It's always on. It's kind of a rare, nostalgic thing. I get tweets all the time about it.

I got into the studio when I was thirteen. At the age of twelve I was doing public performances.

The biggest influence? I've had several at different times - but the biggest for me was Bob Dylan, who was a guy that came along when I was twelve or thirteen and just changed all the rules about what it meant to write songs.

Rock 'n' roll offered me a platform to speak what I felt. It also offered me a platform to support my mama and my brothers and sisters - twelve children.

One of my first concerts ever was seeing Jethro Tull at Fiddler's Green, when I was twelve.

A clock struck out the hour of twelve, and the bird in the hedgerow was still singing as we marched out to the roadway, and followed our merry pipers home to town.

There are only twelve tones and they need to be treated carefully.

My favorite guitar now is my Martin HD-7 because it's got everything. It's got the jingle-jangle thing from the twelve string, it's got the flexibility of the six string, and the bass notes where you can do bass runs and that sort of thing.

I know that I can sing. That's the reason I started playing music when I was twelve years old.

'Hound Dog' took like twelve minutes. That's not a complicated piece of work. But the rhyme scheme was difficult. Also the metric structure of the music was not easy. 'Kansas City' was maybe eight minutes, if that. Writing the early blues was spontaneous. You can hear the energy in the work.

Bands like - even Kiss to a degree - bands like Kiss and Motley, Ratt, Poison, Bon Jovi - I just think the days of those bands going out and selling ten or twelve, fifteen million records like they used to do back in the day, it's not happening.

My dad was a kind of semiprofessional Dixieland-type drummer, and I learned the drums from him. When I was about twelve, we bought our first Ludwig drum set from a pawnshop - a marching-band bass drum, great big tom-toms, and big, deep snare drums.

We'd lie on the floor, turn the lights out, put two speakers on either side of our ears, and try to blow our minds with music. I know that I want to make a record that does that yet a record that, if it was played on the radio at twelve in the afternoon, the guy making the wall - the guy cleaning the motorway - he's got a melody to hang on.

I really like Adam Curtis' 'Century of Self.' It's about how artists have failed the general public by being so exclusive, like being in an echo chamber. I was definitely more like that in my early twenties - my music was completely inaccessible.

I have breakups that I can credit to every song. In my twenties, I picked people who would create that dysfunction and drama, so I could draw upon it.

Now, the instrumentation in the jazz band and the jazz dance band has gone through many evolutions. For instance, in the 'twenties the tradition was two or three saxophones.

I grew up on Wu-Tang and Tribe and Nas, all the raw, very New York-driven music. Then when I got older - in my late teens, early twenties - and that's when I started to listen to Drake and J. Cole, and so it wasn't just East-coast.

John Fahey, thought during his lifetime to be possibly more than a little crazy, was the author of some thirty albums of gnomically introverted droning guitar instrumentals, which I listened to heavily in my teens and twenties; I even produced an hour or so of banjo music in an imitative John Fahey style.

Back in the day for me was a great time in my life - I was in my 20s. Most people refer to their experiences in their twenties as being a highlight in their life. It's a period of time where you often develop your own way, your own sound, your own identity, and that happened with me, when I was with a great teacher - Miles Davis.

L.A. was just an inspiring kind of place to be. It felt like going to Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. Everybody's there. Everybody's hanging around. Everybody's talking about music.

My plan was always to leave school and live in a flat with some friends, have a 9 to 5 job, and try to get as many gigs as I could. I wanted to keep writing and then eventually, in my twenties, head to a record label and hope they'd sit down and listen to my book of songs, sign me as a songwriter and maybe an artist in development.

I was only a teenager when I played with the Herd and Humble Pie, and I was still in my early twenties when 'Frampton Comes Alive!' came out. That was an immense amount of work in a relatively short period of time. I needed to stop for a while and grow up, but I didn't do that.

I studied film scoring and orchestration and conducting and arranging in my twenties, and I scored a lot of television shows and other things.