Quotes About Music

When you're making music or playing a song, I find the moments when there are no instruments being played even stronger than when they are being played. Because they add tension. It's also an ego-less thing - a place where you have no ego - when you're with a bunch of musicians who stop and listen instead.

Color is a plastic means of creating intervals... color harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. We differentiate now between formal tensions and color tensions, just as we differentiate in music between counterpoint and harmony.

So it helped me to just let go of all my tensions and feelings about that world and say 'OK, this is for my fans in Japan. They'll be nice and get into it and have fun.' And it was the first record I made at my home studio.

America used to be proud of abstraction, and we have fallen away from it. The future depends on people trying to promote that abstract thinking. Not just in relation to music and jazz and the arts, but the economy, social strife, tension between people.

I never left jazz. The relationship between structure and improvisation - that constant conversation and tension - I've always wanted in every genre and song that I perform.

You grow as a writer when you learn how to make songs flow from start to finish. That's the best song, when it's such a seamless process to get to this release at the chorus, this euphoric feeling. That's why the Beatles were so good - they did such a good job building so much tension in the beginning to this immaculate release, and then it ends.

Anything that's resolvable is boring, musically. And if it's too chaotic, you don't feel tension; it's chaos.

I love that tension between machine sounds and organic sounds, and also the contrast between abrasive sounds and soft sounds.

When I listen to symphonies, or long pieces of music, there are so many different moods and movements, and things that are really beautiful going to something with a lot of tension.

I really like melodies that have a certain tension against the chords. I like writing things that are sort of insistent.

And you know, we'd go to church. We were Baptists. And every now and then there'd be a tent would set up, and it was the Holiness folks. And we liked their music.

There are so many bands that after their second record are headlining music festivals, and they're still... suited to playing in a tent. Very few bands when they headline a festival can pull it off.

My father gave me formal education in raagdari. He died in Lahore in 1964 when I was 13. I was in the tenth year of school, and my father's brother took me into the qawwali ensemble and started giving me formal education in qawwali.

I had a good record company right from the beginning, and I'm still with them after all these years. I think I may be the only person in the world that's had a tenure this long with any record company.

Right before I go out, we usually put on some Lauryn Hill or Fugees, and I'll do a shot of tequila just to calm my nerves.

The New York Dolls did not think of themselves as punk rock. There was no such term at the time. They were just another band in what was called the New York scene.

What I am looking for... is an immobile movement, something which would be the equivalent of what is called the eloquence of silence, or what St. John of the Cross, I think it was, described with the term 'mute music'.

The 'music industry' is not a term I use. I tend to concentrate on music, and the music business is something different.

Open Graph is a language for structuring content and sharing that goes on in other apps, and we're continuing to build it out longer term. But we found we need to build more specific experiences around categories like music or movies. Where we've taken the time to build those specific experiences, stuff has gone quite well.

There are some musicians who are talented and see themselves as some kind of natural geniuses or something because of a certain amount of natural ability. But that is often rarely the case over the long term.

The Chili Peppers do a lot of improvising, but it's within the framework of song structures. The Meatbats is from a purely instrumental standpoint. But when you hear the term 'instrumental music' you think it's real serious stuff and everybody's playing a million notes and it's about playing fast. That's not what we do.

I think taking back the term 'mumble rap' was important to me because I appreciate and love every facet of hip-hop and everything that's going on right now in the game, so I felt it kind of disrespectful that people kept referring to that whole genre as 'mumble rap.'

I first conceived of my far-future setting 'Punktown' in 1980, and though it contains 'punk' in its name, the term 'cyberpunk' hadn't been coined yet. I took my inspiration strictly from punk music.

Lyrics became important for a while in the late Seventies. Patti Smith was a poet and a rock star, as much one as the other, the distinctions were a bit blurred and then you get swept up in it. Punk poet, it's a good enough term.