Quotes About Music

Tupac, Biggie, Jay. Your usual suspects. These were the people that was played in my household.

Nowadays, if a studio assumes that his film is bad, there is always an executive that gets more nervous than usual and thinks that if they change the music, the film will become a masterpiece.

Whether it's a song that might deviate from an artists' usual sound or even if it's still very much in their world, I think the more people opening themselves up creatively to collaborate with others, the better.

I remember one day during my freshman year of high school, when as usual I was obsessively listening to a cast recording: it may have been 'Jesus Christ Superstar.' And I remember sitting there, totally absorbed, saying to myself, 'I can do this.'

To be honest, my usual makeup is the same as in my music video looks.

I was 7 years old when I began composing. I began composing, improvising at the piano, the usual story.

In music, you ain't really got to be able to sing. In comedy, you may be cute, you may be able to add a little extra to your routine, but if you're not funny, no one's really rocking with you - and if you're a black woman, you better be hilarious. As usual, we always have to do the most.

My best capacity is to edit. If anything, I am a specialist at editing: my usual approach is to record a song very long. In the beginning just jam, jam on and on. Then break the song and play with it.

We have a water purifier, so we drink a lot of it. As a singer, especially in Utah, you have to hydrate constantly.

There's a lot of really talented people in Utah, people who would really make an effort to make the music the best that it could be and as emotional as it could be.

When I was in Utah there, first learning the kind of music I love, my favorite singer was T. Texas Tyler. So my friend, Norman Ritchie, the traveling teenage sage, started calling me U. Utah Phillips.

A lot of Utah State when I was there, there was a lot of California guys. So, you get a lot of Cali music, you got a lot of dance music, I think the Jerk was popular back then. It was a lot of the music that you can dance to with your teammates. A lot of hip-hop, rap, R&B, it was really fun. It was live in there.

As late as the early '50s, jazz was still, for the most part, a genuinely popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary people could dance if they felt like it.

I'm not that big a fan of sampling. But I feel like if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it to where it's more of a reimagining of a track. The songs that I do utilize samples on, most of it you wouldn't even be able to tell what it was unless I told you.

When I was a critic, I reviewed Public Enemy's 'Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age' - this is back in '94 - and I called it a 'Dante-esque spiral of the hip-hop hell.' I idolized Chuck D, but I just hated that record, and I did not hold back. Chuck didn't freeze me out. Every time I met Chuck, he always treated me with the utmost respect.

I love playing. If it was down to just that, it would be utopia. But it's not. It's airplanes, hotel rooms, limousines, and armed guards standing outside rooms. I don't get off on that part of it at all.

The overall vision for 'Utopia' was somewhat of a mix between fantasy, future, and ancient China. All of it soaked in a pastel space sauce to capture the uber positive energy of the music.

I rode the buses in L.A. until I was in my early 30s, and there's something about driving or riding through L.A. after sundown, when the Utopian city goes into hiding and another city comes out, more Doors and less Byrds.

In their matching candy-stripe shirts, the Beach Boys were America's biggest band of the early '60s, transmitting utopian bulletins of summer without end to a cold and overcast nation.

Music is 10% exhilaration and 90% utter disappointment.

The worst time for me is in the final few hours of taking a track that you've worked on for two years and bouncing it down to the final stereo mix. The overwhelming emotion for me is complete and utter fear that I've made a mistake. I'm scared. Afterward, I obsess endlessly about it.

I started singing the second I could utter sound.

I enjoy reading about the lives of musicians, and find many similarities in their ideas of preparation and their utter devotion to this great, eternal language: music.

If I were queen for a day, every city would have to spend one hour in utter silence: no music in shops and restaurants, no honking of horns, no conversations on mobile phones. Only birds would be allowed to sing.