Quotes About Music

Southwark therefore became a setting for a long-running battle between the highest concentration of hedonists in he country, and a movement whose adherents believed that if you tapped your foot to music, you might as well just go the whole hog, rename yourself Beelzebub and have sexual intercourse with the corpse of a recently sacrificed goat.

What we used to say was whoever had the bow tie got to lead the band. There was never any jealousy.

I don't know what that means. To truly live." "To find work that you love, and work harder than other men. To learn the languages of the earth, and love the sounds of the words and the things they describe. To love food and music and drink. Fully love them. To love weather, and storms, and the smell of rain. To love heat. To love cold. To love sleep and dreams. To love the newness of each day.

In Mexico, I first encountered the attitude that was missing from the optimistic sense of living in the United States: a tragic sense of life. Such a sense doesn't force us into a somber cone of depression and futility; it urges the opposite. The tragic sense opens a human being to the exuberant joys of the present. To laughter, carnal ity, the comical varieties of love, to music and art, to the small human glories of the day.

I have sung for Americans of every political persuasion, and I am proud that I never refuse to sing to an audience, no matter what religion or color of their skin, or situation in life.

Not everybody has to sing the melody.

I've never sung anywhere without giving the people listening to me a chance to join in - as a kid, as a lefty, as a man touring the U.S.A. and the world, as an oldster. I guess it's kind of a religion with me. Participation. That's what's going to save the human race.

This banjo surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.

Singing with children in the schools has been the most rewarding experience of my life.

Come back to town. Bring your darn ukelele! We don't care anymore!

our technology and our economic system seem to produce the present bad situation: millions of people feel themselves poor and powerless; millions feel that music is something to be made only by experts.

I tell people I was in the U.S. Army for three and a half years in WWII -- but what did I mainly do to beat the fascists? Play the banjo.

Songs are funny things. They can slip across borders. Proliferate in prisons. Penetrate hard shells. I always believed that the right song at the right moment could change history.

What I'm trying to do is find either existing properties or come up with properties or angles or stories which will create music drama. It's my obsession and most of all I would like to remain working in theatre. I think it's very much alive.

Entertainment came out of this thing called a television, and it was gray. Most of the films that we saw at the cinema were black and white. It was a gray world. And music somehow was in color.

I have terrible hearing trouble. I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal proponents deaf.

When I grew up, what was interesting for me was that music was color and life was gray. So music for me has always been more than entertainment.

The problem for me, still today, is that I write purely with one dramatic structure and that is the rite of passage. I'm not really skilled in any other. Rock and roll itself can be described as music to accompany the rite of passage.

What I took back, because of my exposure to the Jewish music of the 30s and the 40s in my upbringing with my father, was that kind of theatrical songwriting. It was always a part of my character. This desire to make people laugh.

Rock 'n' Roll might not solve your problems, but it does let you dance all over them

The music we play has to be tomorrow's, the things we say have to be today, and the reason for bothering is yesterday.

The Who got paid 4000 pounds during those days, but we always smashed our equipment that cost more than 5000 pounds.

Since so much of this music bubbled up urgently from my subconsious mind, I'm left to interpret it much like anyone else.

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed meeting fans face to face. They're less scary when they aren't going nuts at a Who show. But then, so am I.