Quotes About Music

How long that song seemed—longer than life.

Finally, in the crowded third corner, stand the many people who feel rap is not music at all but rather a form of social problem. They have only one question to ask a rapper, and it concerns his choice of vocabulary. (Years pass. The question never changes.)

I knew there was something not quite right about her rigid notions—black music, white music—that there must be a world somewhere in which the two combined.

I live in dread of being asked to clap along to music in a public place.

At the bottom in the gut of jazz if you listen closely you can hear—no matter how complexly, obliquely, mysteriously stylized—somebody talking, crying, growling, singing, farting, praying, stomping, voicing in all those modes through which our bodies communicate some tale about how it feels to be here on earth or leaving, or about the sweet pain of hanging on between the coming and going.

Ah'll clean 'em, you fry 'em and let's eat,' he said with the assurance of not being refused. They went out into the kitchen and fixed up the hot fish and corn muffins and ate. Then Tea Cake went to the piano without so much as asking and began playing blues and singing, and throwing grins over his shoulder. The sounds lulled Janie to soft slumber and she woke up with Tea Cake combing her hair and scratching the dandruff from her scalp. It made her more comfortable and drowsy.

You cannot avoid hearing drums in Haiti.

All of the people took it up and sung it over and over until it was wrung dry, and no further innovations of tone and tempo were conceivable. Then they hushed and ate barbecue.

Daisy is a walking drum tune. You can almost hear it by looking at the way she walks.

All night now the jooks clanged and clamored. Pianos living three lifetimes in one. Blues made and used right on the spot. Dancing, fighting, singing, crying, laughing, winning and losing love every hour. Work all day for money, fight all night for love. The rich black earth clinging to bodies and biting the skin like ants.

Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

I stay away from the studio too long, I feel like I'm abandoning myself.

I still love Abba.

Abba and me, we were the 70s.

Nobody can beat those songs on 'Abbey Road.'

Abbey Road' was a fantastic record.

Music is still above all else the thing that does it for me.

Abroad in Hollywood, I am called Bling Bling Bappi.

The idea of doing film and music together is an absolute dream.

Every time I play with a new musician I absorb something, even if it's someone you don't like!

I'll take two months off just to listen to records and not do any music so I can absorb all that and then when I go do my music. It's all in me. I'll listen to a different genre every two days or something, study it, 24 hours straight.

The pop industry is so well-practised at channelling young people's creative energy that I think it gets abused.

My mother was a very good violinist; my father was a musicologist and spent most of his life in academia.

I think my mom always wanted to play the guitar, and somehow she projected that to me. So I started learning to play guitar when I was five years old, but actually I'd never managed to get the academic side of it. So even up to today, I don't know how to read or write music.