Quotes About Band

I mean, I think I liked every band I ever played in because each band was different, each band had a different concept, and each band leader was different... different personalities and musical tastes.

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.

The band? No way! There ain't no band. The band is not 'the band' right now. It's just three guys.

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.

Every good band in the world was a cover band first. The Beatles were and the Stones were. Everybody was a cover band.

When I'm representing my music live I think of it very much in a rock band sense. When I first started doing festivals in the 90s there really weren't other DJs playing the stages I was playing. So I felt I was being afforded an opportunity to kind of make a statement about what DJ music can be live. In the 90s, if you were a DJ you were in the dance tent, and you were playing house music and techno music. There was no such thing as a DJ - a solo DJ - on a stage, after a rock band and before another rock band: that just didn't happen.

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.

I feel like there's not as many bands anymore. It's more like there's a front-person and a band supporting them, solo-type spirits that have a look, a vibe, a message, a voice and a style. I was talking about it with a journalist in Europe; he was like, "You're a democracy; everyone in the band does stuff." There's not a lot of bands I can think of that still have it so every member of the band has an equal say. I was like, dude, you're right. I can't really think of any right now. There might be one or two leaders in them, but there are not a lot of bands like that anymore.

I'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.

I know what it takes to make a band, how they should interact, what makes a record sound like it's a band - everything having to do with a band, I happen to be into.

I think that everybody that's coming out to Warped Tour, when they come to see the show, they're always like; let's go see that band that band that band and... that girl. I think that I tend to be that girl sometimes and I think that it's cool that I get to hang out with this Summer camp of smelly boys.

Cornelius Cardew very famous in Britain, because he was the darling of the avant-garde, and he played in a band called AMM, which was an improvising band in the '60s. Paul McCartney used to come watch them. Later on in life, he became disenchanted with avant-garde music, because he felt it couldn't reach the public. It didn't have a wide enough appeal. So he'd take these tunes of old English folk songs and write Stalinist lyrics over the top of them. I do think that when he changed to folk songs, he actually lost the tiny audience he already had, which is quite interesting.

Rhythms, beats, etc., are fundamentally central to my creative drive: my first instrument was the drums, nearly every band I have been involved in or at the helm of, is driven by rhythm, my band is driven entirely by rhythm, machine rhythm, and the purpose of the rock instrumentation is literally to speak the beats, to emulate the rhythms with guitars and bass, with very little articulation, and without being 'progressive'.

My all time favorite band is Paramore and she's basically one of the reasons I was inspired... umm, well Hayley Williams from Paramore was one of the basic reasons I wanted to go rock. I saw the band live and they're great together and they write incredible music and also I like a lot of older bands. I like Motley Crue a lot and who else, I've got a lot of favorite bands but those are pretty much the main ones.

The name came from, erm... us all just agreeing on a name that we liked. There was talk of Swans at first, but there was already a band called Swans, way back in the eighties. An American band. So we thought, well, we can't have them, and I think Andy said, "well what about Doves?" We ruminated it around the three of us and went, well, it's not so bad, it's all right.

When I was growing up, until I was 18 or 19, I was totally invested in the classical music world. I had no concept of anything else. The closest thing to a cool band I listened to was Radiohead. Radiohead were the only band I liked in high school. I was just obsessed with classical music, opera, Claude Debussy, and that kind of stuff.

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.

Jay Z in many ways is a rock artist. In the sense that they've used hard rock, punk rock, psychedelic rock aesthetics and influences in their music. When you see Kanye West, he has a full band playing. Jay Z has a full band playing with Marshalls.

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.

With rock music, it usually revolves around the band. You go in as a band and probably take about a year to record an album. But for a hip-hop song, you can create a track and an idea with verses and choruses in a day, and get three different people on it. It seems like you're able to do more with hip-hop.

We'd started out as a garage band and it became like a huge band, which was fine. But everything was so magnified, drug addictions, personalities, it just became too much.

None of us went to university, none of us went to college, none of us played in a different band before, none of us done anything. We were the last great band to come out of nowhere, on an indie label. We've sold 50 million records. That's still the benchmark. Until someone does what we've done, I'll always consider myself the last big songwriter

I 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.

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.

You 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.

Our band tries and be as personable with fans as possible because up until the last two months it's been very bearable and easy to get to know fans on first name basis, especially the fans who come to multiple shows. Now its getting a little bit harder with new people and it's a little overwhelming so we're trying to strike the balance of being a very public band that establishes a relationship with the audience.

I think women should band together to get us more respect in all the businesses that we're in because, you know, if we turn 40, we're nothing and nobody. We all should band together and just say we're not gonna go down like that.

Sometimes I would go on Sundays and play with Doc Cheatham. I was also playing in a band of teenagers led by Don Sickler called Young Sounds, and The McDonald's Big Band led by Rich De Rosa and Justin Di Cioccio. All those guys were great educators and musicians and taught me a lot! Simultaneous to all this, another one of my musical fathers came into my life, Eddie Locke.

We still talk about [school band]. Almost 40 years later. It's like people are talking about, "Man we need to have a morning band reunion".

Keeping fans loyal is a delicate balance. Therein lies the challenge for any band that's more than a couple albums deep. It's like, how do you continue to make records that are representative of who you are that your fans will recognize as your band, while still trying to push things forward and present new sounds for people.

I'm 90% performer, 10% musician. I've always said that Gossip are a band I would go see, not a band I would listen to.

The Tragically Hip, more so than any other band I've worked with, approach their work like a team. This might sound way too pat, but they're like a great hockey team: all five of them have their roles. They go at their shows like an athletic event; they're in it to win it, and they'll lay it out there on the proverbial ice in order to win and get the crowd on their side. You can't do that when you just throw a band together. There's a sixth sense there that makes it easy.

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.

Everybody now who's playing in Unicorn band is deeply schooled in music. I'm the only one who's self-taught, which I think is a bit hilarious because I'm leading the band and writing the songs, but I'm surrounded by such overwhelmingly competent musicians.

As a result, I had to get my own playground which was my band Colours. This band lasted for about eight years and then the air was out of it and it was time to finish.

I enjoy making music alone, and I like keeping my options open for how I release my own songs. But everybody in Grizzly Bear is full of ideas. So it's kind of boring to come to the band with a complete song and be like: "Here's what I want you to do." With this record, we wanted to make everything feel like everyone - music that we could never do on our own. That's a real gift, and it's one of the best things about being in a band like this.

I think ultimately what you really want is a few people within any label that are into the band enough to really work on it every day for a long time and to actually try a little bit. But obviously, the major labels have more money to spend, so if they feel like spending it, they have bigger resources there when you need them. It doesn't always necessarily translate into them doing a better job for a band, but I think especially if you're playing the game of commercial radio and making videos and stuff like that, that's sort of an expensive proposition.

As I said to Ringo, I was in a successful Rock N Roll band. He was in a band that changed the world. That's the difference.

I certainly didn't predict people who spent years actively disliking the band to all of a sudden like the band. That's pretty funny to me, and it makes playing live kind of interesting, 'cos we're doing lots of things that don't really have a lot to do with that record, and even presenting the songs off that record in a way that's a little more muscular and without as much of the sheen, which is what I think part of what people really liked [about Kaputt].

Another factor is that in terms of the original compositions, this is our strongest year yet. Everyone wrote a fantastic piece and everyone really had a greater sense of how to write for this band -- not only for this particular instrumentation, but for these particular players. Each year, the reality is getting closer to the ideal of a collective.

I am Evanescence. I am the only original member. I have basically hired the band. Evanescence has become me. It is mine and it's exactly how I want it to be.

We've gotten better at shooting down routine material or stuff we feel like we've done better in the past. Getting different people in the band for periods also keeps it from going stale.

Even though there's reasons to try things that may or may not work, it's still a real intimate way to finish the song with everybody right there in the band just locked in.

I think of rock 'n' roll as a combination of country blues and swing band music, not Chicago blues, and modern pop.

I do a lot of curiosity buying; I buy it if I like the album cover, I buy it if I like the name of the band, anything that sparks my imagination. I still like to go to record stores, I like to just wander around and I'll buy whatever catches my attention.

Mexicans are a band of illiterate Indians.

People 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.

My school music teacher, Al Bennest, introduced me to jazz by playing Louis Armstrong's record of "West End Blues" for me. I found more jazz on the radio, and began looking for records. My paper route money, and later, money I earned working after school in a print shop and a butcher shop went toward buying jazz records. I taught myself the alto saxophone and the drums in order to play in my high school dance band.