Quotes About Music

I spend just as much time on how people hear my music as I do the actual music, no matter how long it takes. I'm such a visual artist as well that it always goes hand-in-hand.

If you respond to pop music as an older person, then it's your game. But this business has a tremendously visual focus.

I'm very interested in how visual artists think because I think the way that I think about music is similar. I'm very inspired by aesthetics and space.

I'm very fortunate in that my parents are artists. My mom is a brilliant poet... She still is a great visual artist. My dad is a jazz drummer... I've been very fortunate in that I've had parents who supported and encouraged me and haven't really questioned what I'm doing or asked me to question it.

I have a music-video background, and I feel like the responsibility of a music-video director is to do something that hasn't been done before in a really cool visual way. So much innovation has come in filmmaking through music videos.

Our live shows are a visual as well as a musical experience.

For me the visual is just as important as the music.

You get to bring your own sound system when you play an arena, all the lights and visual stuff, which I think is really cool. There's something about those old arenas, where it feels larger than life.

The image of the band has always been something that's evolved or changed with every record cycle that we've done. I think, in a lot of respects, that's because we were so interested in having a visual representation for the music that we were making.

When The Temptations began, we wanted to be visual. So we did our own choreography and developed our own uniforms.

I began composing works which were imitative of the music I was being told about. I was also very interested in translating the music into visual terms.

As I had collaborated with visual artists before whether on installations, on performance pieces, in the context of theatre works and as I had taught for a time in art colleges the idea of writing music in response to painting was not alien.

The only reason that you do visual is solely for the visual. That's the only reason. It doesn't sell your music for you.

By the visual pattern, but mostly I'm guided entirely by my ear, what I hear.

Jazz vision is a wordless conversation between musical notes and visual expressions.

Everything I do is very visual and very aural, so I don't read music, and I draw as much as I write out lyrics.

If the seams are showing, there is something wrong with the performance or the construction of the piece. This idea is completely at odds with our modern visual experience, because everything today is based on montage.

The way I create music is maybe like a painting, to compose in a more visual way. Basically it's the music that I want to hear- that's my inspiration and bottom line. I just try to get ideas from books, movies, paintings.

Jazz vision for me is seeing my art in musical term. It offers me an visual expressions in an ever-changing musical palette.

There's definitely a visual aspect and an emotional aspect to a song. And that harks back, for me, to theater.

I've created, directed and choreographed for Lady Gaga since the beginning, so 'Born This Way,' this was musically such an amazing evolution and such a brilliant record. So when she played it for me, it took me a while to find out the visual interpretation that I could give back to her.

Video is a funny thing. It's one thing to be an artist, singer-songwriter, and use words and create pictures in people's minds. And then be asked to do video for it, to actually give a certain visual for your song.

I think people should be able to have at their behest, like, four hours of music, entertainment, visual knowledge, different pathways. That's what I'm trying to do with modern technology, not just another song and another song.

I'm into old-time music; I'm not very interested in modern, popular music at all. And if I'm really into some particular old-time musician, some fiddler or banjo player, I'm always dying of curiosity to see what they look like. So there's some connection between visual images and music.