Quotes About Music

I did the coffee house thing - we have coffee houses where people play, or we used to - and when I was 14, I started there. Just played all the time. Every weekend I had a show, or every Thursday. Open-mic nights, the whole thing.

I think music can really affect people's emotions and, when I am about to get into a race car, I definitely listen to music with a good beat - that's when you've got the adrenalin pumping. And the time before you go into a race weekend, you have a lot of emotion and adrenalin, and a lot of focus.

Every weekend we've been trying to go out of town, to let people know about this album. I've been trying to host parties. It's hard, because it's a lot of work to do both.

When I was 13 or 14, I took seven months off from touring. I did a lot of weekend gigs in Louisiana. We have fairs and festivals every weekend. But I took seven months off. That's when I really started digging deep. I wrote a couple songs that year that I still play every now and then for people.

When you're in the music business, every day is the same. If you work 9 to 5, you can't wait for the weekend, but in the music business, you don't know one day from the next. It's always the weekend.

I enjoy staying home with friends more than going out. The other night, for example, my girlfriends and I stayed in listening to some '90s rap - my favorite kind. We were in the Hamptons and made it an all-Biggie weekend, all of his albums on repeat. I loved it.

Because of my interest in songwriting, I was invited to visit a friend in L.A. for songwriting sessions with him and his friends. We wrote six songs by the end of the weekend, and 'Hide Away' happened to be one of them!

You have Vampire Weekend who have more African references musically than most African-American artists.

Every free day, every weekend, I am in a recording session. I'm very lucky to have such supportive people around me.

Every weekend I go to the guitar bar in Hoboken and do a jam session.

It doesn't make sense for me to try to be, like, a dance dude who only releases two 12-inches a year and then plays every weekend. Making an album, you get to put out a body of work that shows a lot of different sides of you. And you get to work on it for an intense period of time and promote that album. And then you get to move on.

Our main thing we'd have to entertain us: All my uncles would come over, and we'd sit around the living room on a weekend night, and we'd play. That was a big event for me, getting to play. We never did have any percussion.

I just feel like this guy who's visiting the music business over the weekend. Every time I write a song, I feel like it's never going to happen again.

At 15 we were going back and forth to Nashville every weekend while we were still going to school.

The first Vampire Weekend record was the first full-length album that I produced.

I never felt like there were things I couldn't express lyrically in Vampire Weekend. I was always proud of everything that we wrote together.

My dad took me to the skate park every single weekend to see alternative bands.

Music is my way of taking my mind away from the game. When I'm singing, you don't got anything to worry about. Don't gotta worry about scoring however many points or winning the game. No matter how good or how bad you are, it's fun.

As hopeful as I am, there are some times in my life when I get to low points. Luckily, I still have music to get me through things.

But I am poised to restart qawwali and have a spiritual album of it available.

Any new ideas go into PiL. My inspiration is everything that the human being gets up to. I don't listen to any music when I'm in PiL-zone, because influences can poison your well. Otherwise, I listen to anything.

There's too many favorite songs, so I'll just say right now my favorite song of all time is 'Poison' by Bert Jansch.

Poison is one of the first, if not the first, truly independent bands to sell 3 million copies of our first record. It was before we were with a big company.

I was 22 years old when I met Robert Johnson. I was there the night he was poisoned.