Quotes About Music

'Remember the Time' and 'You Rock My World' from Michael Jackson were two of my favorite songs ever. My mom used to bump them all the time.

Pete Townshend used to crash chords and let the guitar feed back. He's overrated.

I was madly in love with Elvis Presley. Dad wasn't into it at all, at least not for himself as a performer. He used to say, 'Mr. Cole does not rock n' roll.'

When I was at school, I used to stay on a balcony singing and people would stand around listening.

There's no way in the world I can feel the same blues the way I used to. When I play in Chicago, I'm playing up-to-date, not the blues I was born with. People should hear the pure blues - the blues we used to have when we had no money.

Rock n' Roll came from the slaves singing gospel in the fields. Their lives were hell and they used music to lift out of it, to take them away. That's what rock n' roll should do - take you to a better place.

Fall Out Boy used to be my favorite rock band.

Everybody was always telling me to rap and freestyle. I used to go to the park and spit on the mic. If I go to the park, they always gonna give me the mic.

I used to think that all great recordings happened at about 3 A.M.

I used to play on Phil Spector's records, and he liked to use three pianists.

I used to play - when I first started trying to be professional, I disk jockey from 1949 to 1955 in Memphis, Tennessee, and I was quite popular there as a disk jockey.

I have a bad back partially from playing the drums and singing. I used to have to hold my body in such a position that my spine got out of alignment.

In the late '80s and early '90s, there was a slightly retro drum sound that was popular in hip-hop music called the 808 bass drum sound. It was the bass drum sound on the 808 drum machine, and it's very deep and very resonant, and was used as the backbone as a lot of classic hip-hop tracks.

I used to do most of my composing at a little table in a cafe. Composing for 52 instruments, I had to figure out how to accommodate myself to the small table.

I'm into Incubus. Growing up, I was a huge Taking Back Sunday fan. I'm still a fan, but I don't listen as much as I used to. When I was 13 or 14, I started getting into emo-pop-rock, so that influenced me. I also love Drake... I have a pretty diverse collection.

I used to skate around the rink with my mom, and we used to race each other until I started getting way better. Then she hung up her skates and resorted to playing my music at the rink.

I used to record songs, like, play the beat from one phone and have another phone recording me and just rap. Moving from that to a studio was like, 'Damn, I never knew I could sound like this.' It was just magic.

Every guitar I own gets used and has its purpose.

I used to sing in church, too. Not like in the choir or anything, but for people around the church... on the church bus going home and Christmas plays.

There are a lot of bands that my parents used to go see that I haven't necessarily heard of, and asking them to dig up stuff like that is a really fun way to discover music.

I used to be selected for the Pennsylvania all-state orchestra. It was a thrill to go from my home town of Aliquippa clear across the state to Lancaster for the concerts. No kid is immune to that kind of experience.

The basic function of popular music is to create an environment for courting, lovemaking, and doing the dishes. It's useful because it addresses the heart in the midst of all these activities, and it will always be useful in this very important way.

But for the children of the poorest people we're stripping the curriculum, removing the arts and music, and drilling the children into useful labor. We're not valuing a child for the time in which she actually is a child.

I always say that to compose is to think. Playing is good, it's useful, but it's how your intellect puts the ideas together that will bring hands to write or to play. So, it's really a combination of many things; hearing sounds, hearing layers of counterpoints, of chords.