Quotes About Music

The record company didn't know what we looked like at first. They were all excited about our tapes.

I never really composed guitar solos. Id usually ask to run the tapes and Id go off the top of my head to make something work.

All my writing takes place during the recording of the master tapes. I never do have songs when I start up an album. I actually write them while I record.

I've watched the dynamics of music completely change to where we've sold tapes, we've sold CDs, then everything started becoming 'music is free' now. In a perfect world, Napster wouldn't have come along. But the world isn't perfect, and when it changes, you have to adapt.

There are so many bootlegged Joy Division/Martin Hannett tapes, a lot of really bad bootlegs on the Internet.

I have a lyric journal that I write in a lot. When I'm going to play, I just sit down and have my books with me and my notes and tapes and whatever I need to refer to. I just play and try different things. It's a kind of discipline.

At fourteen, I started sending out demo tapes.

The tapes we were making would jump around with different styles, just quick parts of different songs. Hip-hop to jazz to funk to whatever else. And in a way, 'Check Your Head' ended up being like one of those pause-tapes.

Lots of people I know have bootlegged tapes of performances and if they play it I will be transported back sometimes with happiness, sometimes with horror.

In a serious relationship, I will definitely write music about a guy. I'm totally into mix tapes and I'm all about small little things. I'll drop by their door and just leave a gift or come over if they're sick and make them chicken noodle soup and rent a DVD and play board games. I think those little things mean a lot to someone.

I had a boom box with a dual cassette deck and a mic, so I used to make pause tapes. I think a lot of people started like that because it was all I had. I would just take rap records that I liked and just loop the beat by pressing pause and record and make, like, five minutes of these beats.

After we got our first family car with a tape deck, my dad acquired exactly three cassette tapes: A 'Best of ABBA,' 'Private Heaven' by Sheena Easton, and the soundtrack to 'Xanadu.' I also unironically love 'Xanadu.'

Well, I'm a tape-recording nut. I like to play my tapes.

That was my way, and I also use the music after five years, I started hearing opera, opera, it was very good instrument to keep the spirit very strong because you feel like you are yourself singing opera, and I used to hear a lot of opera, they send me tapes.

In the late '70s, I had a band - the David Johansen band, for lack of a better name - and I started collecting, not records, but tapes from people I knew who had jump-blues records.

I'm a big fan of the American Tapes label. But that's very hard to keep a grip on that because you blink your eyes and they've released three records, all of which are limited edition, all sold at one show. So you have to follow in drips and drops on eBay, which I do.

More than 30 years ago, in Washington, D.C., I secured a copy of a single by a Los Angeles band called The Bags. The two-song 7-inch, released on Dangerhouse, had a girl on the cover who looked right at you with huge eyes. The songs, 'Survive' and 'Babylonian Gorgon,' were great and made many of my mix tapes.

As far as I know, no tapes exist from my years at 'T.J.'s.' I wish they did.

I'd been trying to do this since I was 15, sending out the demo tapes and doing all the things that everyone told me that I should be doing. But no deal - like, never.

This music that was supposed to only come from tapes like in any restaurant. Something would happened. One bird will start to do a little jazz thing, and another bird will start to answer.

Well, I did a harmonica instruction tape for Homespun tapes.

If I do a piece in my living room, if I practice it - and I have the tapes to prove this - it's not going to be as good as doing the same piece in front of an audience.

It's something we, guys, have all done. Made tapes for girls, trying to impress them, to meet them on a shared plane of aesthetics. Read them someone else's poetry because they do poetry better than you could do it, because you're too awkward to do it.

My first super-worn-out tapes were Michael Jackson's 'Bad' and the soundtrack to 'Dirty Dancing.' The soundtrack to 'Dirty Dancing' is actually really phenomenal.