Quotes About Music

I strongly encourage listening to the radio to hear something you haven't heard before. It's a very healthy thing to do. It's strange: unless you reload your iPods every couple of weeks, you're listening to and recycling the same music all of the time. I'm serious. Listen to your radio station.

Having a band was part of my heart's desire, musically. Within myself, I was saying that, 'Not until you have a band for yourself can you maintain the standard of your songs,' and the sound become a foundation. You don't have to feel around for two or three weeks for the sound because the foundation is already built.

Musical accidents are a gold mine. The thing about accidental discoveries is they won't be made unless you put yourself in a position to make that discovery. To do that means hundreds of hours, days and weeks where you do things and don't discover anything.

When I think of Chinese parents, I think of people who weep upon hearing Beethoven, but who can't necessarily bring that joy to others.

It takes a level of creative depression to hear 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun' and weep.

When I hear the bagpipes, it makes the hairs on my neck stand on end. It always makes me weep.

The first time I sang in church, when I was ten, the applause was so overwhelming that I started to weep. My mum had to rescue me from the stage.

I rode on a plane a couple years ago with Snow Patrol and didn't know who the hell they were. They said they were big fans of mine and were playing Madison Square Garden. And they let me listen to one of their records on their iPod. I started to weep.

When you play to an audience, you come away energized. It's the promo that really breaks an artist. Some lad sitting on a box trying to create a drum sound in a dry little studio. Everyone goes, 'Great - okay, now on with my day.' You go back to the bus, and you weep.

I was rejected for couple of adverts for sounding too sad. One was for Diet Coke, but it's a good thing it didn't happen because it probably would have been a big blight on my soul. It also happened with a fabric softener called Downy, and I guess the way I sang 'Only Downy' made people weep.

My definition for 'playback' is being able to create a musical moment for people to have smiles and weep for joy.

I try and wake up relatively early. I listen to some music and check Twitter. I also make sure I weigh myself and check how long I slept. I do that because knowing that data seems better than not knowing it.

To be honest, we never, ever let business weigh down the creativity of this band.

My drummer was my best friend. It weighs on me that we put all that time in - I played with him for 15 years, beginning with 'Laguardia' - and we had moderate success.

I was just writing songs in my spare time, and recording because it's fun to do, and Sub Pop called me and said they wanted to put some stuff out. I had to weigh whether I wanted to put the time into it because it's a commitment. But, in the end, it seemed too good to pass up.

What made me pick up a guitar? It weighed a lot less than a piano.

I wanted to be a film composer because I heard scores that could stand alone, from 'Vertigo' to 'Star Wars' to 'La Dolce Vita,' because this music has so much history. They're weighed with the history of music. They come from somewhere, they have a past.

When I was with Geffen Records, I weighed almost 400 pounds. The label told me that I had a great voice but wasn't marketable having a weight image.

I grew up listening to topical music - songs that were about things. So when I write songs, a lot of the time, they're about the things weighing on my heart that I want people to think about.

A song is a lot of things. But, first of all, a song is the voice of its time. Setting words to music gives them weight, makes then somehow easier to say, and it helps them to be remembered.

The Classic games were Classic because, like classical music or architecture, they strove to give life and weight to ideals of order and proportion, to provide a vision of timelessness. In 'Double Dragon,' we can see the cracks in the brick, the mold growing on the drainage pipes, the unmistakable deterioration of the world we live in.

A great conductor is an alchemical force: someone who can absorb the historical weight of a famous melody, the expectations of an audience, and the mercurial brilliance of a host of musicians, and shape them all to his or her interpretative ends.

I try to avoid gaining weight as much as possible because it hinders my performance onstage. Touring demands so much energy.

Songwriting is the other weight on the opposite side of the scale from touring. They balance me out creatively.