Quotes About Music

I am not naturally inclined to history or geography - maybe that's why I like to sing about it, because it helps me remember.

I'm not going to put out a Christmas CD until it's coming out of me naturally.

I honestly can't characterize my style in words. It seems that whatever comes to me naturally, I play.

Playing with my grandfather, grandmother and my parents, I came to music pretty naturally.

I feel like I was always singing. Since I could speak, I could sing. It came very naturally. In school, I was always singing in choruses and choirs. I always loved to sing; it was something to fun to do.

If there was no New Orleans, America would just be a bunch of free people dying of boredom. -Judy Deck in an e-mail sent to Chris Rose

I heard her voice first. She responded to something Joanna Masci said to her. That note in her voice turned the key, unlocking something deep inside of me. I felt it like a terrible wrenching inside. Everything in me reached for her. For that note she left hanging in the air. I heard the music in me answer.

She laughed, and the sound was tantalizing. He didn't understand how musical notes could stroke a man's skin and dance along his thighs. He didn't understand how the notes could be an arrow that pierced his heart. She owned him.

When she couldn't sleep and the nightmares were too close, she listened to them, sang the lyrics and let them carry the worst of her past away.

Ricco went absolutely still. The pitch was low and sweet. That tone pushed into his chest, right into his center, as if it were a key unlocking something tight and hard in him. He moved his hand over his heart as an unknown emotion seized it hard, wrenching, twisting, forcing that lock to open so that his own music could be heard pounding in his ear, beating like a lost drum seeking the right rhythm.

He recognized the distinctive percussion of the goblet-shaped drum, the dumbek. The kanun was a stringed instrument that produced beautiful sounds much like a harp. There was a ney, a flute that had an amazing tone to it.

Soundgarden screamed from the speakers of the Mustang, music a little older than Jack himself, but it pounded in rhythm with his pulse.

A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless'...

We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.

A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so.

The gramophone keeps reiterating a statement about life with which I do not agree.

It is well known that great art, great music and great literature can emerge out of great pain. This does not lessen the reality of the suffering of the artist, composer or writer, but it points to something creative and redemptive in the human person, made in the image of God, which can bring forth a thing of beauty in the midst of surrounding ugliness, brutality and evil. Nowhere is this more true than in the book of Lamentations.

My teeth were nice commodities, and I did enjoy having kidneys, but I'd give them all away if someone threatened to take my Slayer albums from me.

Theophilus Crowe's mobile phone played eight bars of Tangled Up in Blue in an irritating electronic voice that sounded like a choir of suffering houseflies, or Jiminy Cricket huffing helium, or, well, you know, Bob Dylan.

She laughed. My favorite music.

Why write a song when no one can play the notes or understand the lyrics?

Have you never met anyone who works in a record store? There is no greater repository of unjustified arrogance in the world.

On the radio, turned low, Reba sang of hard times with the full authority of a cross-eyed redheaded millionaire.

Author's Notes] As I write this, September 2002, much about the humpback song is still unknown. (Although scientists do know that it tends to be found in the New Age music section, as well as in tropical waters...)