Quotes About Music

I remember, when I was a kid, my dad would subscribe to the BMG Music Club, and we got that initial 12 CDs for a penny... I think it was cassettes. Eight CDs or 12 cassettes, something like that.

I don't subscribe to the view that only puja numbers recorded during the '60s-'90s are enjoyed by the present-day listeners. Definitely the songs of that period are very popular even now, but the songs recorded afterwards are equally lapped up by the audience.

If you wake up in the morning and your favorite artist isn't on the service that you're paying ten dollars a month for, sooner or later you lose faith in the subscription model.

People are experimenting with streaming, with subscription services, whether it's a Spotify or a Pandora or a Rdio.

I just let the songs tell me what to do - they are my guides, and they are the boss. So I am subservient to the songs, and I let them tell me what to do. I don't judge them; I just write whatever comes to me.

When the subsidies are going out there to fund arts, I'd like to see jazz given a better shake of the dice. It attracts as many people as opera does, but not the subsidies.

I'll never put out some super-dumbed-down music. It'll always have some substance to it.

Hip-hop is substance. It's social. It's science - that's what it started off as. We have fun, and we still having fun; ain't nothing wrong with fun, but we need that social, we need that substance, we need that science, and we need that spiritual.

I like to have songs with me that have substance. That's missing from a lot of today's music. You might hear a song with a catchy beat, but what's it about? It's not empowering or helping anyone.

I'd hate it to become style over substance, I'd hate people to start putting me in a magazine article about my style. I don't like dressing up in something I'm not necessarily comfortable in just to make it more of a show. I want the power to come from what I sing about and how I sing.

The music is the emotional substance of the show; the book just sets it up. Nobody goes to a musical to hear the book. That's the way it works.

Once you can get a fan to listen to an album a handful of times and really have a lot of substance for them to grasp, then you're looking at having a fan that really appreciates what you do for life and can appreciate coming to see it live.

I would rather write something that's authentic to me than something that'll be likely to get played on the radio but doesn't have any substance to it. People can see through that really quickly.

What I have that's special in my music is substance. It's music that people can really relate to. I know I'm gonna rap something that somebody has already been through in their life, something that they will understand.

Just because something is melodic or catchy doesn't mean that it doesn't have depth and substance and progressive sensibilities.

Patty Loveless is the big influence for me. Loving her music, loving how she wrote songs, loving the kind of songs she cut. A strong woman with true substance to her lyrics, but songs that just felt so good.

Despite erasure by the media and other patriarchal institutions, there was, by 1975, a substantial body of feminist writings as well as artwork, music, films, and organization of all kinds.

What gets people into trouble with records now is that they want to build something up without substantial musical ideas. Without that as a foundation, you can add all the layers of sound you want - it's still going to sound like a mess.

There's a lot of music out there that's like, 'I'm so mad! I'm sad! I'm into skulls and crossbones and the color black,' and that's just meaningless and shallow. So much of metal is about that and it's hard to find metal that is substantial and meaningful in terms of its content.

There is no substitute for jamming and getting to know each other on the road.

If you record the sound of bacon in a frying pan and play it back, it sounds like the pops and cracks on an old 33 1/3 recording. Almost exactly like that. You could substitute it for that sound.

The pop musicians often leave meaning in the dust and substitute it for cartoons. The deeper artists - the grunge artists in the world and the emoticon people - tend to leave all of the happiness out of life like it just doesn't exist.

This is why improvisational music and comedy is so inspiring: You are seeing something being born, and that energy, there is no substitute for. These songs, most of them, are about a minute old when you hear them.

Of course, there is no substitute for live performances.