Quotes About Music

If I can't connect emotionally with the music I'm making, there's no point making it in the first place.

I got tired of soundchecks. At first it was important. But after a while, there was no point in me doing one.

There's no problem with fans and bands. There's a problem with the economics of the outside disruption of the industry.

One thing about Indonesians is that a lot of them, even if they don't understand English, have absolutely no problem memorizing English songs. Even my dad.

I have no problem with people illegally downloading stuff. I'm not going to drive hard into 'You should buy my stuff,' because really, it's inevitable. If you like a song, you're going to download it for free. I have no problem with that.

The music that I write, I have to actually own it and live by it, which is cool. It's no problem.

There are some great songs - like, I really like 'Snowcone' and 'Whelk Then' and 'No Problem.' I think I'm dissatisfied that it's not written from start to finish; it's over a year's worth of work that doesn't correlate.

I got no problem with Nas.

La vita, ora lo capiva, assomigliava a una canzone. Al principio c'è il mistero, al termine la conferma, ma nel mezzo ci sono le emozioni che arricchiscono l'intera esperienza.

Sometimes the reason offered for seeking aesthetic excellence in the music of the church is that thereby one pleases God. I think that is true. But not because we know what music God enjoys-- though I suspect it must be music which is unified, rich, and intense! Rather, because it is in the joy of his people that God finds delight.

For a full week after trying to reach the editor of The Atlantic, I occupied myself with other things. On October 31 I made some cheerful notes about Tracy Chapman's singing and about Bizet's Carmen. On the first of November I wrote at length about my ingrown toenail. But it just wasn't enough.

What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?- Rob

Is it wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It's not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There's a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colorful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music.

Because music, like color, or a cloud, is neither intelligent nor unintelligent - it just is. The chord, the simplest building block for even the tritest, silliest chart song, is a beautiful, perfect, mysterious thing, and when an ill-read, uneducated, uncultured, emotionally illiterate boor puts a couple of them together, he has every chance of creating something wonderful and powerful. All I ask of music is that is sounds good.

Sometimes it's moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive. And then there's music, and girls, and drugs, and homeless people who've read Pauline Kael, and wah-wah pedals, and English potato chip flavors, and I haven't even read Martin Chuzzlewit yet... There's plenty out there.

The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives.

It's just that none of us had the wit or talent to make them into songs. We made them into life, which much messier, and more time consuming, and leaves nothing for anybody to whistle.

And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don't like them as much as I do.

Tuesday night I reorganized my record collection. I often do this at periods of emotional stress. There are some people who would find this a pretty dull way to spend an evening, but I'm not one of them. This is my life, and it's nice to be able to wade in it, immerse your arms in it, touch it.

Barry, you're over thirty years old. You owe it to your mum and dad not to sing in a group called Sonic Death Monkey.

It's just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself

It's music rage, which is like road rage, only more righteous. When you get road rage, a tiny part of you knows you're being a jerk, but when you get music rage, you're carrying out the will of God, and God wants these people dead

See, records have helped me to fall in love, no question. I hear something new, with a chord change that melts my guts, and before I know it I'm looking for someone, and before I know it I've found her.

He loved Nirvana, but at his age they were kind of a guilty pleasure. All that rage and pain and self-hatred! Will got a bit...fed up sometimes, but he couldn't pretend it was anything stronger than that. So now he used loud angry rock music as a replacement for real feelings, rather than as an expression of them, and he didn't even mind very much. What good were real feelings anyway?