Quotes About Bands

When 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.

The only thing I say I consciously do is 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.

It's very tough to give advice because it's tough out there for everybody but for a girl it's even tougher, because I don't think the glass ceiling has changed at all in the past 30 years. Otherwise the radio would be covered with girl bands, or girls in bands, so I don't think much has changed on that level. But I think that bands can still have a lot of success trying to go another route.

Bands don't last. Bands don't last forever - it's a rarity when they do.

I followed most of the 80's bands into the 90's as most of those folks who hadn't moved away were all still active. However, there was a point when I lost track of the new bands coming up.

As many bands as you heard [in New Orleans], that's how many bands you heard playing right. I thought I was in Heaven playing second trumpet in the Tuxedo Brass Band -- and they had some funeral marches that would just touch your heart, they were so beautiful.

I consider us to be one of the first Internet-based bands, especially because we basically started our entire band via the Internet. Before MySpace Music even existed, we had a band MySpace page. We were one of the first fifty bands on PureVolume(.com), and we really built everything from the Internet. That's how we started talking to record labels, that's how we booked our first tours. Without the Internet social networking, like Twitter, we definitely wouldn't be where we are today. It is a huge part of the band.

Bands that have positive lyrics that give people hope, I applaud them, you know I think we need to see more bands come out like that. I think it is great.

I think the biggest faults that bands tend to have in terms of drama or breaking up is bands don't learn people's personalities. When you spend as much time with people obviously it's going to rub off, and you are going to get to know the way people are. You can make sure day to day people are accommodated to and people feel positive about the experience, then you can stay together as a band, at least that is my opinion.

There were a lot of times where there was a great deal of fodder recorded and played, because there was a market for it - just as there is today. And there were more bad bands than there were good bands - I think that should always be remembered.

Growing up I played in garage bands and cover bands with my older brother, and he got us a gig opening up for some hippie jam band. I was 15. I felt like such an adult!

There's a lot of hidden gems in the UK. You sometimes have to dig deep to find them, but there's still a lot of great guitar bands out there. So, in a way it makes you appreciate it more, but then a lot of bands do go missing also.

The bands that have been the most important to me, and the records that have been the most important to me as a fan, have been records that surprised me for one reason or another.

All the bands I've played with have had dynamic front men.

Most bands have a sound that they're already identified with, so for the producer it becomes a process of helping them find their muse in the studio to make a record that will not only satisfy them artistically, but will also do something in the marketplace.

I've always loved playing in bands where there's like three or four people and we're all throwing out ideas and coming together to make an album.

When I first heard bands like Tortoise, it seemed to come off the back of that world, like let's make a record with three vibraphones and release it on a seven-inch with black-and-white artwork.

I 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.

In a world of bands called Limp Bizkit and Hoobastank, Electric Sheep rolls off the tongue like a Shakespearean love sonnet. Leave me alone.

The R.E.M and Nirvana successes don't mean much to me except as a potential distraction for bands who want to cash in on the trend. Don't try to sound like someone else. R.E.M and Nirvana don't sound like anyone else.

When I was four, I think I just wanted to make noise. When I was about 10 years old I was given five CDs for my birthday: Pink Floyd's 'Dark side of the Moon,' the Sex Pistols, Prodigy, Jimi Hendrix, and I can't remember the fifth one, but really different kinds of music. That's when I started to grasp it and enjoy it, listening to it. Then I started being in bands at school.

I know a lot of bands that will make their first record and get to a certain level, and then when the second record comes out, they can start where they left off as a headlining act playing in front of a certain number of people, or they can go back out and make a lot less money and open for people. I feel like if you go out and just go right back into that headlining stuff, you're playing to the converted.

I always loved all kinds of music. I would watch musicals a lot as a kid, on TV, watch the Fred Astaire movies. I'd watch 'The Wizard of Oz.' I was a big Jerry Lewis fan, and they'd have these big bands and someone singing - some siren, or some guy singing some gorgeous song. I was always enamored of that style of music.

You hear about bands who say, "We did one show where only 20 people showed up", well that was our average gig for five years.

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.

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.

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?

A government held together by the bands of reason only, requires much compromise of opinion.

I was never able to get through Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. I've never been able to make it through. And I love the Smashing Pumpkins, they're one of my favorite bands ever, but I've never been able to listen to the whole thing all the way through.

If you want to be negative about the whole thing you can say all guitar bands after the Beatles were just a waste of time because the Beatles were the best. I think it's far better to give new records a try.

And rock being a male-dominated, testosterone-driven place that I've been in the eye of the hurricane now for several years, I realized that it can be a place that can perpetuate homophobic behavior unless it's addressed by bands like us.

We wanted to offer something new to our audience. I hate it when bands stop taking chances.

I think jazz was just seeking respect and validity because a lot of people didn't believe it was a viable art form, and then they got a lot of attention in Europe. A lot of bands that can't catch flies in the US have these followings in Europe, [but] it's less and less the case. American audiences are way more sophisticated and adventurous than anyone thinks that they are.

In 1980, I moved to Chicago, and I recorded demo tapes for my friends' bands, and in 1981, the first Big Black record - the first thing I did that was an actual record.

I think that the quality of all bands is steadily improving and it is a pleasant thought to me that perhaps the efforts of Sousa's Band have quickened that interest and improved that quality.

I listened to a lot of bands that were happening at the time, but no one in particular.

One of the first bands to break out of Seattle was Heart.

But I end up with these bands who have players from literally all over the world.

I have a lot of compact discs. I need them for radio play and convenience. Many bands and artists I am a fan of don't always release their work on vinyl, so I take what they feel like giving me.

There's somewhat of a real fascination with American bands and American mythology in London, so I think we've tapped into some of that. Maybe because of the way the press works or whatever, they have extremely knowledgeable music fans over there. People who will sit there and talk to you about some record that came out in 1967 out of Memphis that you've never heard before.

Being in two full-time rock bands is pretty impossible. I love to tour but I have a dog and I want to see him. And, being a songwriter, you have to have experiences and do things. You can't just go on tour all the time, otherwise you get nothing to write about. It's finally at a point where the balance is perfectly right.

For a period in the '90s, I felt that the Cure was massively undervalued. But there has been a paradigm shift. There's a bunch of newer bands coming up who've grown up listening to the Cure and don't understand that you're not supposed to like us.

I understand why some women/girls/ladies don't want to be women-identified 'cuz it totally complicates your band identity and no one seems to pay much attention to the music or what you're doing. We have chosen to be girl-identified (although Billy isn't a girl!), because we want to encourage other women/girls to play music. When I was growing up, I found it discouraging to have all these women in bands not wanting to address the issue of gender...we're interested in what women are doing.

Most bands don't even last fourteen months let alone fourteen years.

I just think that the way the industry is changing and the world is changing, it might make more sense in two years for bands to have a different band name every time.

I got out of that immediately was that now, all of a sudden, rock music had become a spectator sport, that corporate labels and their bands were the new establishment, and punk was there to fight them the way the activist hippies must have fought what the establishment must have been ten years before. And it was interesting to see the reactions in different parts of the country.

I grew up in the '80s and '90s listening to Public Enemy and Mobb Deep and the Smashing Pumpkins. I don't even know what it was like in the '60s - I wasn't alive then - so the Mayer Hawthorne sound is taking what I can learn from the classics, and blending it with my hip-hop DJ and producer background and punk-rock bands that I played in as a kid.

I only performed a song so I could not write an essay. I just enjoyed being around bands, and around musicians, and, I didn't want to be the girl who followed the band around. I love singing, I love performing, but it's never been this goal.