Quotes About Music

Rap music... sounds like somebody feeding a rhyming dictionary to a popcorn popper.

I like pop music. I consider rock 'n' roll to be a branch of pop music.

I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.

It used to be that you'd have a song recorded by a major country artist and if it was a hit, you could buy a car. Now you can buy a dealership.

During a period of life when most of us do not have fancy watches or cars, music becomes a cheap, socially important signal of distinction. We are trying on, like silk-screened T-shirts, various identities.

Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble. Everyone who's connected with it, the studio's gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that's left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago.

You know what I really love? The CD players in a car. How when you put the CD right up by the slot, it actually takes it out of your hand, like it's hungry. It pulls it in, and you feel like it wants more silver discs.

For a songwriter, you don't really go to songwriting school; you learn by listening to tunes. And you try to understand them and take them apart and see what they're made of, and wonder if you can make one, too.

Sometimes the magnetism of a song is impossible to ignore, and it demands that it be sung in a certain way.

A gentleman is someone who can play the accordion, but doesn't.

Oh, I'm not a percussionist, I just like to hit things.

The piano has been drinking, not me.

Sing me a rainbow. Steal me a dream.

Your old home town's so far away, but inside your head there's a record that's playing, a song called 'Hold On

The Music was like Electric Sugar

I've never met anyone who made it with a chick because they owned a Tom Waits album. I've got all three, and it's never helped me.

I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things

Singing is just doing interesting things to the air. Elongating it and twisting it into shapes.

The studio is torn down, all the people who played on it are dead, the instruments have been sold off. But you are listening to a moment that happened in time sixty years ago and you are hearing it just as sharp as when it was made. That remains an amazing thing to me.

Songs are really just interesting things to be doing with the air

If you're in the middle of the ocean with no flippers and no life preserver and you hear a helicopter, this is music.

When you're doing the traditional musicals, singing songs that are 40 and 50 years old, you realize there's a reason why those musicals are hits. These are amazing songs!

It's amazing to hear, as a voice matures and then starts to decline, what kind of emotion is still conveyed by a really good vocalist.

Music can affect for good or ill the body as well as the mind.