Quotes About Band

We went from being thought of and talked about as "a band that plays a so-and-so style of music" (a grunge band, a stoner band, etc) to "a band that plays music with a certain sensibility or style to it". I'm not able to see quite what that is, but it's there and some people like it a lot.

What does surprise me, though, is the amount of attention this band [Guns'n'Roses] has garnered 11 years after the original lineup broke up. That's an interesting phenomenon. It was even interesting back in the day. I mean, [we were] this glorified garage band. It was a great band, but it was not the kind of band you expected to become what it has.

I was basically 18 when I got offered to join Mister Valentine band and go on tour and leave high school. I was pretty stoked on that, but the band wasn't really my style so after like six months of playing with them I decided to play with the aesthetic of a DIY hardcore band playing pop music. That was the original idea.

A good analogy is stretching a rubber band. You can stretch and stretch and even feel the tension increase in the muscles in your hands and arms as the gap from one end of the band to the other widens. But at some point you reach the limits of elasticity of the band and it snaps. The same thing happens with human systems.

A lot of the music is the kind of thing I grew up with, listening to it with my parents. So there was a band in London called the BBC Big Band, and I sang with them. And I had never done a big band before, and it was just so fantastic and I had such a good time...so that's how it all came about

I went to my first show [of the Grateful Dead], got right up front and never left. The incredible excitement, the family, the spirit, the hope, the happiness, all the different things I love and live for in life are there. The joy, the optimism, the teamwork, the experimentation, the exploration, the curiosity. No band has inspired more artwork, no band has inspired more books. No band has ever inspired a more loyal following and I'm involved in all of that stuff.

Without doubt, the foremost band for decades has been the One O'Clock Lab Band at the University of North Texas. Through its many incarnations and under various leaders, they have demonstrated the highest qualities of musicianship imaginable, plus a willingness to balance their big band tradition with creative exploration. Astounding ensemble work, insightful interpretations of the arrangements, imaginative writing, and above all, a loving attention to musicality . . . these people play beautifully.

I was raised in bars. My grandmother had one, and when I was 12 years old I'd go stay with her and that's where I got to watch her band play -- she had a seven or eight-piece band, and I would sit in the kitchen and peek through the door. I was kind of a 12-year-old bottle washer.

I didn't decide to start to playing piano until I was almost 13 years old when my friends and I thought it would be fun to start a band. None of us actually played any instruments so the band never quite got off the ground, BUT it made me go home and ask my parents for piano lessons. That was really the beginning for me. Once I started, it was all I wanted to do.

I didn't join a band. I didn't start a band. I got asked to do it. It kinda happened by accident.

I was in one bar band from 1965 to '69, then I was in another one from 1970 to '79 - a 9-year bar band!

Toasted Heretic should have been cherished and helped, rather than ignored or sneered at, or put down as "quirky band with an arrogant singer". So I certainly didn't help the band, but the virtues I had meant that we recorded albums when everyone else just listened to them. But, yes, if you could suffer from high self-esteem, then I certainly suffered.

I brought the music out to L.A., and the producer Tommy LaPuma heard it and he said - "Man, I love it. Let's do it. Let's record it." I said, "Okay, where's the band?" He said, "We don't have a band. We want it to sound exactly like your demo." I said, "Well, I played all the instruments on the demo." You do that when you're making demos. You got your guitar, you got your sax. He said, "Well, I want it to sound just like that, so get all your instruments out here." So I ended up playing all the instruments.

At Carnegie Hall the Preservation Hall Jazz Band showed how easily it could hop from era to era. It could work like a rhythm-and-blues horn section or a tightly arranged little big band if need be, but it could also switch back into the polyphonic glories of vintage New Orleans jazz, in which nearly every instrument seems to improvise around the tune at the same time.

For 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.

There was a band very early on in our class, and I played in that band and as a teenager, I continued. It was more from my own relationship with the instruments at this time, figuring out the instrument and then having to learn different pieces that I really got into music. I really discovered the almost transcending power of music. And I think that is why I am so into it.

A guitar for me is pretty much strictly in the context of writing songs for my band, coming up with ideas with my band, and then being able to perform those songs as best as I can on stage - that's what the guitar for me has always been.

I 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.

The thing about Matt Cameron is he has made us 1000 times a better band than we've ever been. He's such a freight train on drums and such a cool individual as a man that it makes us better as a band, and we are now complete with him.

I'm in this band to give volume to various struggles throughout the world. To me, the tension in this band is a minimal sacrifice.

When I showed ‘Black and the Red III’ in Malmö, Sweden, it was a continuum - a band - all around the galleryseeing this huge space in the gallery in Malmö, 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 l’oeil 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 ‘Black and the Red III’ and continued that on the wall.

I was the drummer in a band called Hemsworth for a brief stint, too - it was not very great. I didn't even write the songs, but the band was named after me.

I did exactly what I wanted to do. It was always my intention to put a band together and be a band and not be about the solo pop guy. That was never me. All of the musicians that made me do what I wanted to do were bands. I didn't see it any other way.

Ben was more improvisational, and relied less on methodology, and basically is a guitarist who switched to bass, whereas Jeff has a more traditional approach to playing bass in a band, and has a great sense of what his band sounds like, and we lock up nicely.

But I always wanted to do a theatrical stuff. But when you're in a metal band of course you're limited because five people in the band, um, you've got no keyboards... you're limited. And I wanted... to go over-the-top, you know. Literally. I wanted to make an album that people would either hate or love.

When I clicked into this idea of doing a band and examining a band as a dysfunctional family, I wanted to reverse that Rescue Me formula.

The rewriting is always crucial to what I do; whenever I do a scene, I always tell myself that this isn't final and that I can do it again, better. The pacing is probably from experience. I've always liked gradual disclosure. I keep thinking of my rubber-band theory. You have a rubber band that you keep pulling and pulling and pulling, and just at the moment of snapping you release it and start another chapter and start pulling again.

I met the Santana band when I was 14. By the time I was 15, I was a member of the band.

Throughout my whole life, as a performer, I've never played with a band. I've always played alone, so I was never required to stay in rhythm or anything. So it was a real different experience for me to start playing with a band. There were so many basic things for me to learn.

I wasn't looking to be an Indian brass band, but to be a band that reflected my complete identity as an American. The America I was born and raised in intersected with people of all ethnicities and beliefs and that, coupled with my parents' instilling of good values, made me the individual I am now. Within Red Baraat, there are varied musical backgrounds and personalities and that lends itself to many great thoughts and ideas; it's what makes social science, or more precisely, social interaction so interesting to me.

I have so many indie bands on my iPod. What I don't really understand is the attitude that if a band is unknown, they're good, and if they get fans, then you move on to the next band.

I actually think the band doesn't need the television show. And I actually think the television show holds it back. No one at radio wants to play a band that's on a television show.

There are five of us. We've all played in various bands together, in different combinations. I know that Todd [Cook] and Tony [Bailey] are my favorite rhythm section - they're just like a unit. I guess we've all just played together in various capacities, so when the band was coming together, it was sort of like we just chose members because they had similar sensibilities and also because they're just cool. We all got along real well.

Being in a rock n' roll band was like being in a Sherman tank. Nothing got to you. You were surrounded and protected by men.

The Beatles are the most credible band in the history of music.

When everything is together - the band, me, the audience, it's boss! It's just like magic.

You just have to work with your discomfort. ... It’s challenging, but you have to dance the dance that the band’s playing. You can’t say: “I came here to Cha Cha and they’re playing a Waltz, godammit!”

China has to move to a more flexible foreign currency trading system, no question about that. You might see two or three moves to widen the band, say to 0.5 percent.

From my time in 'King Crimson,' I'd describe a Progressive band as one that keeps trying to break musical barriers, and keeps trying to do new music.

The drummer in my first band was killed in Vietnam. He kind of signed up and joined the marines. Bart Hanes was his name. He was one of those guys that was jokin' all the time, always playin' the clown.

Years ago I was in a band called Two Lane Blacktop - we deliberately named ourselves after the 'Two-Lane Blacktop' movie, 'cuz it's a car chase movie. All our songs were based on movies, every single song. I love movies, and that was something that me and the singer in Two Lane Blacktop bonded over - we were design students together, we did a film-class together, so we became obsessed with movies. It's followed me around ever since then, it's a constant theme.

Every band I've come across has read more than I have.

I grew up in a Southern Baptist-style church with a choir, a band, and music, but I've been asking myself my whole life, "Why is my own church, my own community, rejecting me because of my sexuality?".

I got the whole band set up in the basement and we are jamming.

I'm really getting better at guitar. I'm not trapped behind a piano. You can get out and move with a guitar and still direct the band.

I didn't write any music at all, and then, I remember Jon Anderson being very insistent saying that there were two kinds of musicians: the ones who wrote music and the ones who didn't. And clearly the ones who wrote music were more superior human beings in his mind. So he kind of nudged me and sort of prodded me into it. I picked it up slowly. Then I learned more about chords and harmony and I just kept adding to that. One of the great things about having good players in your band is that you just ask them questions. You can pick up some good information that way.

Sometimes I'll go out into the crowd and keep singing, but I'll get maybe seven rows out and I'm out of synch, I'm a couple seconds behind the band and then it becomes chaos.

I think of a band like Animal Collective where they really follow their own sound and I think that's a really important thing to do. You can find an audience if you can find your voice.