Quotes About Music

Since I'm allergic to various things, the army wouldn't accept me during the war, and I got into the Office of War Information, which sent music to Europe.

With Australian audiences, there's a certain level of education - as far as how much access and exposure they have to music from various genres. So when you do 'Big Day Out' and there are all these different musical acts, you see the same people in your crowd that were there for a completely different artist.

I grew up poor in crappy situations... various crappy situations. What kept me sane was reading and music. I had so many different literary tastes growing up, be it fiction like Stephen King or Piers Anthony or non-fiction like reading Hunter S. Thompson essays or reading the Beats. I was a huge fan of the Beat movement.

When I was a tiny tot, we only had one record player in the house, so there was either Genesis on it or the Jungle Book or The Beatles as well, and various other things.

Abjure all accretions and turn off the lights. Put on some music - Leonard Cohen, say, perhaps his 'Various Positions' - and let your mind cool down. Soon you'll forget there's a word called 'stress.'

Everyone enjoys downtime at home, I'm sure, for various reasons, but I find the whole system of being out there and doing shows for people - the more of it you do, in fact the more energizing it is, for me individually.

When I started playing the bass, I became kind of fascinated by it and started investigating various styles of bass playing, and I was really struck with funk music, mainly American funk music - Stanley Clarke, Funkadelic and that kind of stuff. That comes out in a couple of songs like 'Barbarism Begins at Home.'

I'm interested in exploring various forms of newer media that might allow those who otherwise don't listen to country to find and connect with my music.

I always considered trying to make a living playing music. But it was always really clear to me, at the various stages in my life, that it really wasn't a possibility unless some phenomenal thing happened.

I've made so many changes to my records because of the way the audience has reacted at the various festivals I've played - I've taken tracks back into the studio, stripped them bare, and built them back up again to create something entirely different.

With 'Stillness', I don't think I appreciated how very codified all the different genres were in radio formats and the various constituencies of the culture. But music is music, too.

I used to pretend to be an expert on various kinds of music, even if they didn't really interest me.

To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching. To attain it we must be able to guess what will interest; we must learn to read the childish soul as we might a piece of music. Then, by simply changing the key, we keep up the attraction and vary the song.

Everyone's definition of what God means can vary. But music is something that really takes you to that - 'sublime' is a great word. That thing that is greater than we are. The beauty, the magic of the universe.

Every time I hear a recording I've made, I hear all kinds of things I could improve or things I should have done. There's always so much more to be done in music. It's so vast.

I am not comparing myself to great artists, but when you see conceptual artists at work, on some level it's reassuring to know they can paint figuratively. Likewise, when you listen to the '50s jazz people who do these vast solos, you buy into it more if they open by playing a tune.

Purple - I mean, the music and the influence and the subliminal touches range from orchestral conversation to jazz to blues and soul and God knows what. It's a vast range of expressions.

My plays are for the kind of black people who relate to funk music, to Parliament-Funkadelic. When those guys get out of a spaceship - the idea that black people are from outer space, there's a poetic truth to that. We are this vast people.

Creating any type of art is all about mood. I've been making extreme music in one fashion or another for decades. And truthfully, Down has a big enough fan base to where I could remain content to do only that, but music is a vast territory and I am an explorer. And I'm a lover of all things considered extreme in music.

And I've found that, you know, the world of music is so vast and so broad, but at the same time, it's easy to find parts of yourself in places that you wouldn't even think that you were, you know?

Everyone you talk to in the world, whether they know it or not, because the catalog is so vast, a lot of times people have favorite songs that are Motown songs that they didn't even know were Motown songs.

I would love to hone my skills and learn Indian classical music. It's a vast sea of melodies and ragas, and I enjoy it immensely.

Money's Too Tight to Mention' was about as big an anti-Thatcherite message as you can get in pop music. There was a vast swath of the British media at that time that were rabid Thatcherites; do you think they are going to take kindly to me? Then I got hit by the left, because we were too popular.

I'm like a twenty-two-year-old kid in a new band trying to get noticed and break through, because the vast majority of people have never seen me play live.