Quotes About Bands

I've always been a fan first and foremost - obsessing over bands and seeking out bands, and spending hours and hours listening. When I played music, the scope of my fandom became more myopic; I was focusing on the bands we were touring with, or the bands on the label. And you're always positing yourself in relation to other bands. Since I haven't been playing, I feel a little less cynical. I'm able to seek out music and approach it strictly as a fan.

I played in rhumba bands, mickey mouse bands; all kinds of bands.

I definitely make an effort to work on different styles of music: not working on too many post-rock bands, or too many heavy bands, or too many folk bands, or just whatever. I have no desire to be known as somebody that just works on a single style of music and would rather avoid it, actually.

For music, I always just played music myself - and, I had rock bands and wrote songs and put bands together that were loud, but not especially good. That was sort of the place music had in my career.

And, well of course, Count Basie, and I think all of the black bands of the late thirties and early forties, bands with real players. They had an influence on everybody, not just drummers.

Me and my bandmate having known each other and worked together for so long, the process between us is kind of effortless. We've both played in other bands and recorded things outside of Foxygen, but there's something about what happens between our personalities when we make music that works. Also, with it being just the two of us, we don't have the problems that other bands do. We don't have a bass player saying, "What about my parts?" We play all the instruments between us, and we don't really have much ego about that stuff.

I don't think that bands that make it on their first album are as strong as bands that don't: there is nowhere to go but down.

I was never too interested in high school. I mean, I never went to a dance, I never went out on a date, I never went steady. It became pretty awful for me. Except, of course, I could go see bands, and that was the kick. I used to go to Cleveland just to see any band. So I was in love a lot of the time, but mostly with guys in bands that I had never met. For me, knowing that Brian Jones was out there, and later that Iggy Pop was out there, made it kind of hard for me to get too interested in the guys that were around me. I had, uh, bigger things in mind.

All the universes are bound together by a web, a matrix, which is our perception. And our perception actually has colors; it has bands. We call them bands of attention.

Pearl Jam is a band I have a lot of respect for. Nirvana and Sonic Youth I feel the same way about. Mumford & Sons, My Morning Jacket, Wilco, Givers, and Foo Fighters are just some of my favorites. I respect bands that give me something of themselves that I can feel. ("Posing" bands turn me off generally speaking.) It all has to do with a feeling I have about them. That is what music is to me, a feeling. It's similar with people too.

It's the faster bands that made me want to play guitar, bands like The Jam.

I think that the oversaturation of music market right now will eventually start taking care of itself, where some bands are like, "We just don't want to do it anymore," and other bands say, "Things just keep getting better." It just depends on where you bring your joy out of it. We're lucky because we are happiest when we're onstage.

If what you want to do is make artwork for bands, you have to love doing it because there is almost no money in it. In order to start doing it, you just have to put yourself out there, work for bands you love and for as little as possible to start, if not free, that's what I did for years.

All the bands get along really well. That's one of the biggest things on a tour. It's great to get all these cool bands together, but if they don't get along it sucks.

When I was young I wanted to make films and then I got into folk music when I was about 12, and started going to this folk club in Auckland. My dad [Barry Andrews] was in punk and post-punk bands, so I guess it was a side of music I hadn't really listened to before - the really narrative form of songwriting.

Friends of friends had bands in college or in their early 20s and had a moment where they had some kind of interest from a record label or manager. It's always interesting how people handle those decisions and those moments.

The thing that kills me is all these bands that use huge words in their lyrics, 'I'm swimming in a vortex of apathy.' I'm like, 'What?' I don't walk up to a friend and go 'That's a stylin' looking vortex of apathy you've got there pal. I was swimming up a river of deceit myself.'

My songs were influenced not so much by poetry on the page but by poetry being recited by the poets who recited poems with jazz bands.

I do think that some bands seem to be dabbling in the rock-hip-hop world and are not necessarily serious about it.

I want to support young girls who are in their 20s now and tell them: You're not just imagining things. It's tough. Everything that a guy says once, you have to say five times. Girls now are also faced with different problems. I've been guilty of one thing: After being the only girl in bands for 10 years, I learned - the hard way - that if I was going to get my ideas through, I was going to have to pretend that they - men - had the ideas.

Finn regarded pesky little things like wedding bands, engagement rings, and jealous, hulking menfolk more as amusing challenges than immovable obstacles that could be hazardous to his health.

I don't like meeting bands that I like, because in the slight case that they might not be cool, it kind of ruins it for me.

For me the idea was always throw myself into different situations and push your imagination as far as you can to get to where you want to get to. I think a lot of bands make the same record over and over again because they're married to the same three or four people. At some point they've done all they can do with their own imaginations.

I didn't know anything about fashion, growing up in Orange County. I just knew about it through music, how ska bands dressed.

That's what so sad about a lot of modern music, in my opinion, so many young bands never stay around long enough to fulfill their ultimate promise. They only get halfway there or a quarter of the way there.

I don't think bands should feel compelled to speak out unless they actually have something to say. I think that's a big mistake, where you're turning into a coyote running off the edge of a cliff. Too often, people just feel like something is happening and they want to be part of this thing, and it's just, there's sort of a "me too!" and that's about it.

My personal relationship with music is an imperfect harmony because I never studied music, but here I am not just writing for bands but full orchestral sections and doing all this composition, and I never learned the right way of doing things so I have a lot of dissonant sounds and things that are brought to my attention, and generally I leave them that way because I like those imperfections.

We went to see Lenny Kravitz last summer in Austin and he was awesome. His show was just awesome. I mean, like, when you see some of these great bands, you sit there and think, man, if only we were that tight, you know?

The sudden and abrupt deletion of all individuals occupying the lower bands of the Tone Scale from the social order would result in an almost instant rise in the cultural tone and would interrupt the dwindling spiral into which any society may have entered.

My roots and Victor's are jazz, basically, but these two young fellows that we have with us come out of rock bands. And they're tremendously exciting players.

Well, I don't care for Paul Ryan's sound or his lyrics. He can like whatever bands he wants, but his guiding vision of shifting revenue more radically to the one percent is antithetical to the message of Rage.

You can not ignore his current life. Bowie has become a family man and enjoys to see his children grow up close to him. But after six years he feels the urge to get in the studio with musicans he likes. He closely follows bands like Arcade Fire in recent months. But he is inspired by ancient Chinese folk and jazz these days as well.

People in bands don't have the kind of conversations people might think they have. The best things about being in a band are the things that are unsaid.

I'm busier than a busy person. People aren't scared to play this raucous, harsh music over radio speakers, so I think it's the perfect time to get in with some real serious, heavy bands.

When I was growing up and listening to bands like the Dave Clark Five, the groove was what initially got me going. I really like that funky, heavy groove.

In high school I wanted to be a rock star and was in a lot of bands.

Oh, Brethren, it is sickening work to think of your cushioned seats, your chants, your anthems, your choirs, your organs, your gowns, and your bands, and I know not what besides, all made to be instruments of religious luxury, if not of pious dissipation, while ye need far more to be stirred up and incited to holy ardor for the propagation of the truth as it is in Jesus.

You can see when that happens with bands when they do TV appearances; they just shut down. They get really irritated.

I'm a drummer. I've been playing since I was three. I was in college bands when I was in elementary school: you'd see all these older kids and then this little kid behind the drums creating this big sound.

Yeah, my son likes a lot of guitar bands. He gave me something the other day which was really good. He'll burn a CD for me full of things that he has, so he's a pretty good call if I want to check some of that stuff out... The other two aren't quite into that yet.

I love Les Beaux Peeps. Everyone in that band works together really well. I used to go out to see bands a lot; now it seems there just aren't any I like.

So when bands work with me and it's 10 o'clock, usually you'd have to be getting out of the studio, we could go on until 2 in the morning cause it's my place!

My idea was to release four four-song EPs, just like all the old Limey shoegaze bands used to do.

It takes 300 years, it seems, for the great bands to get their due.

Other bands gave us lip service, but when it came down to it they kind of backed off. That was a little disheartening. But I respect them. That's their business.

I'm fascinated with the attitude of younger rock bands, even ones that are making money at it. I don't ever hear them talk about it as a "career." It almost makes me think there isn't even a music industry anymore, like an atom bomb fell and it was just eradicated forever.

There's a focus that hasn't been there for ages and ages and some American bands are sounding quite English like they did in the late 70s and early 80s.

Punk-rock gave music back to people. For a long time, when I was very young, I went to go see arena rock bands. I was 16 and it was all I could get in to see, legally. And I saw Led Zeppelin and Ted Nugent and Van Halen and all that. Me and [Minor Threat and Fugazi vocalist] Ian MacKaye would go to these concerts, and it was fun.