Quotes About Music

A lot of young drummers have a tendency to really overplay. Sometimes simple is better, and the notes that aren't played between the spaces are bigger than the notes that are.

When it's a rapper's album or a singer's album, there's a tendency to want a text-based or theme-based narrative.

The way that we imitate each others' riffs is something that other bands don't do as much. If we're jamming with a jazz band, or I am jamming with a jazz band, I have to catch myself, the tendency is always to do that.

The world is so caught up in the 'American Idol' idealistic sort of tendency in regards to just thinking that this whole thing is what everybody wants, but it doesn't help you make a better record.

I sing in full voice in the car and have a tendency to harmonize badly.

I think a lot of musicians play for the playback. I mean, that's the joy of recording - you want to hear what you've done and what you've contributed - but never listening to that playback kind of removes the intellectual part of making music, and it removes the tendency to be revisionist.

I think my writing has an old-fashioned feel to it for whatever reason. I'm just so influenced by the music that I listened to growing up, a lot of it out of the '60s, so it has a natural tendency to feel like it's from another era.

There's a tendency for young musicians - I certainly was guilty of this - of wanting to know what they sound like, before making their first record, before releasing things. But I think that's the wrong order of operations. You only find out what you sound like, when you have five records under your belt.

Most singers have their idols. I remember Elvis Presley when I was a kid. When I was about sixteen, I always said I wanted to do 'Love Me Tender.'

I just really want to make - to be cliche about it, I want to make pretty music. Like Roy Orbison or Elvis, man. Those guys made beautiful, tender music.

The point is that I am such a big fan of Puccini and that Butterfly is the most difficult and complete role that you can imagine. Just to sing it with a good voice is not enough: it asks tears from your soul. I am very emotional on stage, and the music is so tender that I suffer for real when I am singing it. So I cannot do many performances.

I can't tell you how many times I've had a friend tell me, in this tender and discreet voice, 'It's just you and me bro, and I want to tell you the truth: make a record of you and an acoustic guitar. Please. That's what everybody actually likes.' That's so funny to me.

A tender touch, a shared experience, listening to music that both enjoy, with the scent of fresh mogras, is my idea of a beautiful celebration of love.

I love karaoke - I usually do Blondie's 'Heart Of Glass,' or 'Try A Little Tenderness.'

I listen to Neil Young and jazz and classical stations and, if my girlfriend's driving, it tends to be Hall & Oates.

African-American music tends to have, at the very least, a glimmer of hope to it - sometimes full-fledged hope.

I found that so many people in the music business started out as metalheads in the Eighties - whether they're songwriters, producers, engineers or executives, and no matter what they look like, with short hair, suits or whatever. I feel like my generation of metal kids really tends to populate the music world to a large extent.

Beethoven's music tends to move from chaos to order, as if order were an imperative of human existence.

What you find with singers, no matter where they're from, if they have any kind of an accent, the accent tends to disappear when they sing.

When one knows at an early age that their gift, talent and direction is musical, one tends to focus on that and let nothing interfere or impede the forward motion toward the end of that rainbow. And after 50-something years of rockin' out, you still realise there is no end to that distant rainbow until one's last sunset.

Dance music tends to be a solitary affair.

When we improvise freely - that is, without a structure - it tends to sound more like 20th century classical music, more like a classical ensemble improvising, as opposed to a free-jazz group, where you're more used to hearing saxophones honking.

I've heard many reports of police attending scenes of domestic violence where they've had to turn off music and televisions and radios. Noise tends to drive us a bit crazy.

People comment on the way that I phrase. And in my 20s, I realized, my phrasing is jazz phrasing. I don't comply strictly with musical theater phrasing. Musical theater tends to be very one and three, and jazz is definitely two and four.