Quotes About Music

I never listened to the Grateful Dead as a teen; the only exposure I got was what came through the walls when my sister was listening to them.

The audience plays a huge part in how a piece will actually form. They really allow the performers to walk a tightrope in a way that never seems to happen in the privacy of your own four walls. I'm listening to the audience, and they're listening to me.

I'm hoping to knock down the walls and broaden the lane a little bit more for music that's pop music at the heart of it.

I prefer to sing in the shower 'cause the acoustics are really, really good, I mean, when you're singing against the tile walls then you really hear yourself, hear your voice, you know, throwing itself back at you.

I was a teenage idol, but not the one that the girls would put up on their walls, like Fabian and Frankie Avalon. I was more cerebral, like a Roy Orbison or a Buddy Holly. I was one of the few who could write songs.

With streaming services, the walls have come down a bit on genres. So I never really set out to make a country record or a pop record. I just wanted to make it mine.

You can go to places in Africa and Asia and find Marley graffiti. In the slums of Nairobi, you see his lyrics painted on walls, and you realise he has this almost religious significance to the underclass of the world. He's a guy born in a hut with no bed, and now he's probably the most listened-to artist in the world. It's fascinating.

My father was an amateur oil painter, so some of his oil paintings were on our walls. There was one above the piano of a famous Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko, playing an instrument known as a bandura. I remember that one kind of resonated with me; it was always central in the living room.

Part of being a pop star is image. I'm told by many of my female fans that I was the poster on their bedroom walls. But if I only had that - the image and the beauty and the curly locks - I would have been a 'normal' pop star, one who comes and goes after one hit record.

American Odyssey' will be an amazing adventure inside the musical walls of our cities. It's theater, and radio has always been great theater to me.

I used a '57 Les Paul on one track, 'These Walls', which features Alam Khan on sarod. I tuned it way down because the sarode is naturally in C but I tuned the guitar down to D and he came up to D. It was all a pretty simple setup.

The fan base that I've had all these years has come along. Some of them are not as plugged into the digital world, so they want to go out and buy the CD at Walmart or something.

My dad had a guitar that he gave me. I went to Walmart and bought a chord chart and hung it up in my room, and I was just trying to figure out how to play the guitar and put words with what I was learning.

It is a real piece of art if you can make a waltz sound like it is the easiest piece of music to play, because it's really not.

It is my personality alone that has brought back the waltz and made it a global craze.

The waltz can be sad and at the same time uplifting. You have to see life from both sides, and the waltz encapsulates that. If you're in my audience you give yourself to me and the waltz will grab you.

My mother played the piano and my father the violin, I can remember my dad teaching me how to waltz; I had my feet on his, my mother playing the piano, and my husband will tell you the lessons weren't very successful.

With the waltz, especially the Viennese Waltz, it looks so beautiful and effortless and flows.

Where would I be without Johann Strauss's beautiful 'Blue Danube?' Without this piece of music I wouldn't be the man I am today. It's a tune that brings out the emotion in everyone and makes them want to waltz.

The waltz is a very important part of my life. It's a very important way for me to express my positiveness, bringing humor to the world.

I began to write a kind of waltz and in a little more than an hour I had the theme written.

There's a lot of different moods that come across in my shows. Even when I'm playing a slow waltz song, sometimes there's crowd-surfing. Most of the time there's a mosh pit.

There's nothing like rehearsing a waltz to a Stormzy track. It's hard to compare it to anything!

People are always coming up to me, thinking I've got some magic wand that can make them a star and I want to tell them that no one can do that. Making hit records is not that easy. But it took me time to realize that myself.