Quotes About Music

The music stuff is just a hobby.

High Water Everywhere" by Charlie Patton. If you have a hard time making out the lyrics, you're not alone—even Son House (who, along with Howlin' Wolf, was influenced by Patton)

Blind Pig Blues

Back Water Blues" by Bessie Smith. This is the one most closely associated with the 1927 flood,

Back water done rose at Sumner," sings Patton, "drove poor Charlie down, down the line.

Down Hearted Blues," by Bessie Smith. This is the song Ingersoll is singing to the baby

Bob Dylan's 2001 tribute to Charlie Patton.

The "back waters" she sings of are old riverbeds that were deliberately flooded to take pressure off the main channel's levees. "Back water blues done call me to pack my things and go,

Mississippi Heavy Water Blues

When the Levee Breaks," by Memphis Minnie. Memphis Minnie wrote this with her husband, Kansas Joe McCoy; it was later covered by Led Zepplin.

My Dad died during the flu epidemic in 1918 when I was 4 years old. He left a lot of classical recordings behind that I began listening to at an early age, so he must have been a music lover.

Yeah, my drum programming especially is based on my knowledge of playing a drum kit. For the bass too, definitely. It was the first thing that I translated any sort of ideas through. It must have shaped it somehow.

Remember the war against Franco?That's the kind where each of us belongs.Though he may have won all the battles,We had all the good songs.

It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.

It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead for a year.

Life is a piano what you get out of it depends on how you play it

I don't think two blokes having the same fucking argument for 16 years over and over is the stuff of opera. Oasis: the Opera would be very short. The fat lady would refuse to sing it.

The choir are screaming now, fugue-permutations veering and careening to the outer limits of the field where any ratio of intervals or pitches might hold sway: tonics swapping with subdominants within the space of single notes that seem to play out in three octaves all at once, false entries, inversions, retrogrades and diminutions running riot through all keys -- until, suddenly, these fall away, like clouds

I have actual dreams of Bruce Springsteen calling me up on stage to wear a bandanna and play rhythm guitar next to Little Steven.

I don't treat the band like I'm above them or that they're a hired hand for me. We've never worked that way. So I'm a team player. I would be very uncomfortable having to do this alone.

It's funny how the music industry is enraged about the Internet and the way things are copied without being paid for. But you know why people steal the music? Because they can't afford the music.

How 'bout a cheer for all those bad girls? And all those boys that play that rock and roll? They love it like you love Jesus, It does the same thing to their souls.

trombone—the audience is a working model in three dimensions of the music, a synesthesic transformation of materials. And of course the band is also watching the dancers, and getting ideas from the dancers' gestures. The relationship between band and audience is in that sense like the relationship between two lovers making love, where cause and effect becomes very hard to see, even impossible to call by its right name; one is literally getting down

Music was my entry point into the world of the spirit that New Orleans embodies.