Music Quotes

The desire to hit a big home run is dominating the music business.

In a weird kind of way, music has afforded me an idealism and perfectionism that I could never attain as me.

If you want to be a doctor, a lawyer you must go to college. But if you want to be a musician or such, study your craft. Study music.

If you want to be a musician, study your craft. Study music.

If somebody would come and they're not playing music, they would encounter certain people on another level.

Why do musicians give so much time to charitable causes? The most humanitarian cause that we can give our time to is the creation and performance of music itself.

Hope you don't think this is Billy Joel unplugged. I'm a piano player. I'm already unplugged.

So I was always around music and my dad was in his own way a progressive jazzer, a big band jazzer guy.

The thing that is making jazz healthy today is that people are coming out of other backgrounds - from rock, folk, from ethnic music. It's changing the music, and for the better.

When I was 20, political music was the uncoolest thing on earth. But when Bush got elected, that was the first time I started actually reading the news.

I probably have the crappiest tattoo -- not only in country music -- but maybe the world.

You could listen to Woody Guthrie songs and actually learn how to live.

I was really lucky that I came to puberty at a time when music and politics were completely intertwined

Every day FM radio ran out of hours, not music.

We JAH people can make it work.

There's only two kinds of music I don't like....Country and Western.

Miles Davis turned his back to the audience when he came out on stage, and he offended people. But, he wasn't there to entertain; he was all about the music. I kind of do that.

I do a lot of performing, but don't get a chance to go to the studio and write good music.

I was a schooled musician. When I made 'Blue Velvet', I told everyone what to do. I was an arranger. I learned music in school I told the band to play this. I told the guitar to do that.

I played Big Band jazz music. I wasn't into rock and roll. I was just there because it was a living. I surprised everyone. I'm still surprising people.

The great thing about the arts, and especially popular music, is that it really does cut across genres and races and classes.

A lot of political music to me can be rather pedantic and corny, and when it's done right - like Bruce Springsteen or Jackson Browne or great satire from Randy Newman, there's nothing better.

The most significant New York club for me was Paradise Garage, where they played house music. This was around '84 or '85.

Quite frankly, I've always listened to the black side of the radio dial. Where I grew up, there was a lot of it and there was a lot of live music around.

Music draws from almost the identical place as art does, which really is that intangible - it's like you're pulling from the ether. I don't know where it comes from.

So much of Jazz doesn't have an audience other than music students or musicians.

The music business can be very cold. And it doesn't honor its elders.

Frank Sinatra turns 100 this year and his music has been a major player in the soundtrack of my life. So it's only right that I return the favor and pay it forward.

Ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.

All music has political dimensions because it suggests a way of being.

We're going through this super-uptight era, which I think comes entirely from literacy, actually. It's the result of machines that were designed as word processors being used for making music.

I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.

I hate the rock music tradition. I can't bear it!

There are certain sounds that I've found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.

Agressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It's inevitable.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

Because I go outside sometimes, I'm exposed to terrible, terrible music in public.

To keep creating something with this type of music, you have to take it out of the box.

Surfing music is dead. It was just a summer craze for kids on the beach. I'm finished with it.

I'm really passionate about music.

I want to make music that stands the test of time.

The music business has let me touch a lot of people with my talent.

Whatever I've got going on, I play music to accompany me.

I know my sound, and I have to be true to who I am as an artist, even though I want be real cool, and make really cool music.

I really wanted my music to reflect my personal life and what I set out to do every day.

With the Internet, bands can come and go every five minutes and the music looks disposable.

Music was my way of keeping people from looking through and around me. I wanted the heavies to know I was around.

I think that is what film and art and music do; they can work as a map of sorts for your feelings.

All I try to do is write music that feels meaningful to me, that has commitment and passion behind it.

Certainly tolerance and acceptance were at the forefront of my music.