Quotes About Music

And the tuberculosis old men At the Nelson wheeze and cough And someone will head south Until this whole thing cools off … —Tom Waits, "Small Change

When you improvise, do you think of the chord changes or the melody? Both. This is an interesting question which Im unable to answer adequately. If the melody is the skeleton of the particular object, then the chord changes are its wardrobe, its changes of clothes. I tend to pay rather more attention to the latter than to the former. All I want is just a trace of skeletonthree bones from which the rest may be reasoned out.

They use all of the music that I did in the '50s, '60s and the '70s behind people like Tupac and LL Cool J. I'm into all that stuff.

A country song is a song about life.

Instead of weeping when a tragedy occurs in a songbird's life, it sings away its grief. I believe we could well follow the pattern of our feathered friends.

My life is singing. I don't plan on retiring. I plan to die on a stage. I can have a headache but when it's time to sing and I step on that stage there is no more headache.

The muse doesn't come without being called.

I don't think I ever sing the same way twice. The blues is sort of a mixed-up thing. You just have to feel it. Anything I do sing is part of my life.

I enjoy being happy every day, and hopefully you can hear my happiness in my music. Life is beautiful.

I'm getting old! My back hurts, I got asthma, I just been listening to Amy Winehouse, trying not to cry. Life's crazy.

My goal is to be one with the music. I just dedicate my whole life to this art.

Record stores can't save your life. But they can give you a better one.

For the rest of my life, the one song that people will remember -- regardless -- is "Conga" . . . I never get tired of singing it. It never gets old for me.

Sometimes I think, not so much am I a pianist, but a vampire. All my life I have lived off the blood of Chopin.

For a long time I heard rap without paying attention, but it is still a way of life, even when you're a kid.

I know that if there's a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart.

Woody Pines is the best band I ever heard in my life I swear. I'm their biggest fan now!

I realized I was tired of singing about trees and flowers. I wanted to sing about real life. From then on, nobody could tell me anything was better than blues.

Backup singers just bring so much more life to the situation. When a voice opens up, there comes the life.That's when it's a person-to-person connection.

I know that the most joy in my life has come to me from my violin.

I take a baths all the time. I'll put on some music and burn some incense and just sit in the tub and think, Wow, life is great right now.

When you live your life through records, the records are a record of your life.

There is musick, even in the beauty and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument.

Adult life is dealing with an enormous amount of questions that don't have answers. So I let the mystery settle into my music. I don't deny anything, I don't advocate anything, I just live with it.