Quotes About Music

When I'm singing a song, I picture somebody in particular. A lot of it is to a guy.

Whether it's music, loss of something, loneliness or friendship - if that emotion is heightened in some way and painted to fit in between the covers of 32 pages, that can become a picture book.

When I do shows, I take pictures and make the fans feel like family. All of that really matters. That's the cheat code if you ain't got a hit.

Music is like art, so I just paint all my pictures and put 'em out there.

There's some pictures of me playing hollow bodies, but I never last long. I always come back to the acoustic.

I've been painting and drawing and taking pictures as long as I've been writing music - and I've actually been drawing longer than I've been writing music.

Some people take pictures; I write songs.

Everyone in a band has a big ego - they love having pictures taken.

All roads lead to 'American Pie.' 'As American as apple pie' was the saying. It was some kind of a big American song that I wanted to write, which would be a conclusion for my show and bring all the songs home, which it still does. I can go anywhere I want with American music and come home to that. And it all makes sense.

I think 'American Pie' is great.

In a sense, 'American Pie' was a very despairing song but it can also be seen as very hopeful.

Influenced by Pete Seeger and the Weavers, McLean proudly wore the mantle of troubadour in the early 1970s, when 'American Pie' topped the Billboard charts, and has never shed the cape.

There is no real way to categorize McLean's 'American Pie' for its hybrid of modern poetry and folk ballad, beer-hall chant and high-art rock.

I was around in 1970, and now I am around in 2015 ... there is no poetry and very little romance in anything anymore, so it is really like the last phase of 'American Pie.'

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of 'culture.'

I think I have every piece of music Bob Marley ever made.

There's some familiarity in Celtic music, even if you've never heard that piece of music before.

Well, I don't know any piece by heart, but Mozart goes something like this... What do you think?

To me, meeting Buddy Guy was like meeting a piece of history.

I wanted to make a classical piece that was actually designed to be a CD, not designed for performance.

Mr. Fantasy was the only song that was scribbling on a piece of paper.

So writing a song is much harder than doing a classical piece for me, because in a classical piece, I can just let the mood dictate what's going to happen.

With the piano I'm completely in control of the gestural situation-not that I'm going to play the piece myself, but I know what's difficult, what's impossible.

Very often, if I know the orchestra doesn't know a piece or it's a new piece, I have main ideas about it. But then we start to play and I never talk about places where they played so beautiful and so clear in the beginning that there is nothing to say.