Popular quotes about Band! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 14
Kansas has always considered itself a "rock band" - some people might say "symphonic rock band," others might say a "classical rock band," but we've kind've prided ourselves on being a rock band. Kansas rocks.
Phil EhartThe band? No way! There ain't no band. The band is not 'the band' right now. It's just three guys.
James HetfieldThe Beatles weren't like any other band. Everybody in the band sang, which is why you knew everybody in the band.
Gene SimmonsAll those experiences were a chance to learn more about music. Playing with the Valley band is like such a "live" band. I mean, really, in many ways Bright Eyes is really a studio project. We form bands to tour, but it really is - you know, we take the songs and we figure out how to decorate them and it's all in the studio, we build the songs that way. Whereas Mystic Valley Band was the exact opposite, where everybody knows what they are gonna be playing on the song and there's sort of a general stylistic approach, and then it's just plug in and play.
Conor OberstI'm seeing myself as an outsider a little bit - definitely when I started the band. I knew what band's name meant and nobody else really did, so I'd be on stage every night and say, "Hello, we're Art Brut" - basically saying that we were rejects. But I mean, I didn't really sing, it did feel a bit like we were outsiders. It was a bit tongue-in-cheek when I first named the band that, but then we slowly turned into that - like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Eddie ArgosWhat's cool about indie rock is that one band can do effectively the same thing as another band, and one band nails it, and the other one doesn't. I like that elusiveness.
Andrew BirdWe haven't started playing it live yet but we're going to. And then 'Warpaint' is a song that's really, really close to me because it's actually - we've had that song for many years now and it's changed so many times, it's been through every reincarnation of our band with every drummer, with sometimes with me playing drums, it was when we were a three-piece, every incarnation of the band that we've had we have played that song.
Theresa WaymanI haven't got a great jazz band and I don't want one. Some of the critics, Down Beat's among them, point their fingers at us and charge us with forsaking real jazz . . . It's all in what you define as 'real jazz.' It happens that to our ears harmony comes first. A dozen colored bands have a better beat than mine. Our band stresses harmony.
Glenn MillerThe whole punk scene is, of course, responsible for the Go-Go's ever getting created. Because before punk rock happened, you couldn't start a band if you didn't know how to play an instrument. But when punk happened it was like, 'Oh, it doesn't matter if you can play or not. Go ahead, make a band.' And that's exactly what the Go-Go's did.
Jane WiedlinWhen I was a kid, I was playing in various bands - amateur bands, garage bands, weekend bands, you name it, around the area. At some point, I just wanted to try the whole 'Beatle tribute band' thing, so I found a local band that was doing that.
Steve LandesThe Big Band Era is my era. People say, 'Where did you get your style from?' I did the Big Band Era on guitar. That's the best way I could explain it.
Chuck BerryDue to people's health, and certain things that have happened to people's physicality because of their healthy, that would probably keep us from touring per se. It doesn't mean that the original band wouldn't someday do a song. But our focus is on the current band, and moving into the future, as far as touring is concerned.
Phil EhartThe music as a whole is selfish, but the musicians aren't," "The song may go on forever but it's not about competition within the band; it's about playing as a band.
Joshua HommeEven now, when I try and think of band names just randomly, I'm so thankful that 'fun.' is the name of the band. I never really think twice about it. It is so simple and so easy.
Nate RuessYou have to figure out as a band how a band becomes a business, and then you have to keep that business mentality separate from the creative one, which is good for the songs. It's always a work in progress.
David LongstrethRidley Pearson also plays bass guitar and sings with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a band made up of such successful authors as Amy Tan, Stephen King, and Dave Barry-a band that, according to Barry, "plays music as well as Metallica writes novels".
Otto PenzlerFor me personally, and as a band, there are a lot of challenges. Being in a band is like war, it's a battle - to focus, to really put together something that's formidable and then keeping everything together.
Erik RutanI like myself. I think I'm cool. But I think when you're in a band you take on a role within the band, and I think people over the course of years can identify those roles as almost being bigger than just the individual. I don't know. It's kind of hard to talk about.
Stone GossardI think the Internet really sussed things into perspective. Because twelve years ago, I could spend my days on writing and running my band and touring and making posters and practicing with my band and working on my vocals, but I didn't spend a large pie chart of my time sifting through criticism as well, and nowadays I do, and all female artists do, because to be able to promote your work, you need to live in those spaces.
Amanda PalmerI have some idea that if I pick on [boy band] One Direction, I'll get a ton of hate mail, because I know that when you're 15, you love a band like you will kill people. But I don't quite realize that that's true about people - adults - who read The Hunger Games.
Joel SteinIn high school I was in a band called Goodfight, but it was more me running around on stage. It was very punk inspired. Then I started to get into indie-rock and older music and decided I wanted to write my own stuff. I quit the band. Around 16 or 17, I started recording myself at home on keyboard and piano.
Angel OlsenI grew up not really listening to guitar players. Especially when I was studying music, I was just interested in piano players and arrangers and composers; I came to playing in a band from the perspective of someone who never expected to play guitar in a band.
Daniel RossenAnd then we came here for three weeks of band rehearsal with [music consultant/member of the band "Sloan"] Chris Murphy. And I grew up in Toronto during Sloan's heyday, so like I was like "Oh my god!" And so that was pretty cool.
Alison PillWhen I showed โBlack and the Red IIIโ in Malmรถ, Sweden, it was a continuum - a band - all around the galleryseeing this huge space in the gallery in Malmรถ, I just took a deep breath and I put the paper around in a single band. Then I continued along, printing on the wall like a trompe lโoeil to reiterate the images in the work printed on paper that I had push-pinned to the wall. I literally took the rhythm and the images from โBlack and the Red IIIโ and continued that on the wall.
Nancy SperoYou know why Foo Fighters have been a band for 20 years? Because I've never really told anybody what I think of them. The last thing you ever want to do is go to therapy with your band.
Dave GrohlA lot of things just got distorted, like stories about each other. After the tour we never talked. I believe a band should be a band.
Tommy BolinThe reason I don't play any of the old songs is because I really honor my old band, and I think that those songs are best served within the context of that band.
Billy CorganAs long as you want to pay to see a band, what makes the band want to get better? Nothing! Really! The Stones are, God knows, horrible beyond horrible, but it doesn't stop the fans from paying money to see them decompose in front of your very eyes.
John SeagallI was going to record a solo album when I was 15 on a four-track. I started working on it, but then Fall Out Boy happened. The band was awesome and took me in a totally different direction. I don't regret it at all, but the band delayed the record I had been planning.
Patrick StumpInstead of just being a band that's constantly replacing members, we figured we'd done all of the stuff we wanted to do. It seemed to make sense to see if we could live our lives without the band.
Jeff RosenstockWe're not a band because we're trying to be the Mother Teresas of the music industry, out to serve everybody. We're a band first and foremost because we love playing pop music.
Alice NutterYeah, sci-fi is definitely a big influence on Fear Factory. I've had people tell me we always sing about the same thing but it's like well, if we were a black metal band we'd sing about Satan, you know? What if we were a Christian metal band? All the songs would be about how much we loved Jesus.
Dino CazaresWe weren't like mates who decided to form a band. The other three met me because they were interested in being in the band that I was starting.
Billy CorganLuckily for me, when I was growing up in high school, I had a band, and I was a singer in the band. I'm less of a legit Broadway singer than I am a pop-rock singer.
Stark SandsOnce again, in the fine tradition of North Texas Lab Bands, this is truly a superb band. Under the artful leadership of Neil Slater, these great musicians have managed to combine small group "openness" with the swinging precision of a classic big band. Very enjoyable!
Michael BreckerI tend to write pretty much by myself. I always did that anyway. I used to write with Ron Strykert 'cause he was the only guitarist and we played well together. We lived in the same place. I would play a certain style and he would kind of dance around what I did, in a sense. I learned from him and also vice-versa. With this band, I think I bounce ideas off everybody. Perhaps on the next album they'll be more collaborative stuff, but for the last 2-3 years, I've been pretty well writing by myself.
Colin HayBeing in Nirvana was amazing an experience that will never happen again for me. And I look on them as some of the best and worst times of my life. But we're in this band, the Foo Fighters, making music for the love of music. We all came from bands that had disbanded, and we were drawn to each other because we missed playing - we missed getting in the van, loading our equipment, and watching it break down in the middle of a show. And that feeling hasn't gone away. There's nothing I'd rather do than make music. It's the love of my life.
Dave GrohlBlackheart Records being 25 years old represents staying power and the fact that we weren't able to get a record out through conventional means, so we had to create this record company to put out our records if we wanted to be a band that had records to give out to their fans.
Joan JettWe just did three albums in a row of shaking our fists in the air and yelling about George W.Bush and the government. I didn't think I was going to have to do three, but the idiot kept getting reelected. I just wanted to remind people that Ministry is actually a good rock band. We can do some party stuff, too.
Al JourgensenI got in the school band and the school choir. It all hit me like a ton of bricks, everything just came out. I played percussion for a while, and stayed after school forever just tinkering around with different things, the clarinets and the violins.
Quincy JonesPeople want you to produce records. They don't care what it took to make it. When a band is out doing concerts, the fans don't want to know about equipment difficulties. They want their hour-and-a-half release, and that's it.
SlashYou just have to work with your discomfort. ... Itโs challenging, but you have to dance the dance that the bandโs playing. You canโt say: โI came here to Cha Cha and theyโre playing a Waltz, godammit!โ
Jeff BridgesOne day when I was like 9, I heard the Beatles on the radio, and I asked my dad who they were. He told me they were the best band in the world, and I became obsessed. He started giving me their albums in sequential order, and I listened to them - and only them - until I was probably in high school.
Lukas Haas