Popular quotes about Bands! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 11
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.
Steve LandesI had 12 years of classical music as a child, playing piano competitions as a teenager, playing in blues bands and rock 'n' roll bands, country and jazz bands. I played in about any situation.
Ronnie MilsapThe tools are evolving, and people's interests are evolving as well. So, suddenly people like to hear bands, people like Devendra Banhart or the xx, bands that make a kind of virtue of sloppiness. That isn't what they would describe what they're doing, but the fact is they make a virtue of the sort of hand-made nature of what they're doing.
Brian EnoAs 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.
Louis ArmstrongEverybody needs some real rock in their lives...whether it's bands like ourselves, Aerosmith or Stones...or new bands like Five Finger Death Punch, Avenged Sevenfold...it's out there.
Nikki SixxThe three of us [me, Mike Dean, Woody Weatherman] all learned how to play our instruments together. We had a common interest in bands like Black Sabbath, Deep Purple. Bands who had different time signatures etc and for whatever reason, we morphed into Corrosion of Conformity. It's been about thirty years now.
Reed MullinWe had a wonderful department that scouted out new music. It was beneficial to Rolling Stone, because I would come back and say, "You have to hear this, you have to hear that," and I found a lot of bands to feature, emerging bands. It [ended up being] symbiotic.
Jancee DunnI got to a point in my life when I'd done loads of things I regretted. I made all the wrong decisions. I was trying to fill my life with all these projects, hoping that one of them would succeed. I was like a cheating girlfriend. I was cheating on all the bands with other bands, and I was trying to manage everything.
DuffyI have been doing merch' since I was 15 and in bands when I was a teenager - silk-screening shirts, making the emulsion in my mom's closet I converted into a dark room, through college. That's essentially how us bands survived was selling homemade t-shirts.
Steve AokiI played in rock bands in college and then right out of college I moved over to Europe and lived in Ireland for about four years playing in indie rock bands. I love and miss being in a band, I still am in a band but pursuing that as a career I definitely missed it but I felt like that ship had sailed.
Bill WattersonMy brother was always in bands and on the road when I was a kid and he was my inspiration. He never made it with a big band, in fact he never made a record. Here he is fifty-something years old.
Jimmy ChamberlinI've always played music and I've always been in bands and there have been periods in my life where the music has taken a much more front row seat than any acting. For a big period of time the acting work was really a way of raising money to fund my music. And then that all sort of changed around and that's fine.
Jim SturgessWrite your own music and write frequently. Go to as many live shows as you can as well (of bands you enjoy of course). You can learn a lot watching other performers.
Dia FramptonI like Adele, Mika, Natacha Atlas and a beautiful old record, 'An Evening with Belafonte/Mouskouri,' starring Harry Belafonte and Nana Mouskouri. What they have in common is they all have incredible voices. I am very much into voices. I would say I'm a fan of voices, not of sound. I'm a fan of singers, not of bands.
Christian LouboutinBoogie! I hate boogie, God, I mean, not the Chicago boogie like Willie Dixon or Howlin' Wolf, but all those awful white bands.
Tom VerlaineI think that was going on with bands like The Strokes was that the idea of the band, a real band, was making a comeback. My brother in law is an example- before he was listening to some country music, even some of that awful nu-metal stuff , but there weren't many options really.
James MercerI 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 MillerI know that bands that haven't put out a record for 10 years are playing to 20,000 people a night. But that's not the achievement.
Robert PlantThere are few people who define the word, 'rock star' better than U2's Bono. He's revered the world over not just for leading one of the biggest bands ever, but for his very public work on behalf of the underprivileged in Africa.
Daryn KaganI somehow always found the right people on my own to jam with as well as playing with all my buddies. I didn't get to a point where I was auditioning for any bands.
John PetrucciWe just wanted to get as far away from the rap-rock scene as possible, because its been done and other bands do it better than us anyway.
Adam RichAs a female band, we don't come from trying to be appealing or "sexy." There are a lot of bands - and I'm not dissing anyone - that talk a lot about being girls. I'm more into the idea of being ourselves and letting that speak for itself.
Emily KokalI would urge all bands that say they only care about credibility and don't care about money to send Gene Simmons every dollar that they don't want. I'd be happy to take it off them.
Gene SimmonsI started playing guitar when I was 12 and probably from that age knew that I wanted to make music and make my own music. Playing with other bands like the Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens was more like an apprenticeship for me than anything.
St. VincentI think Queen tribute bands are great. However, we have to keep them at arm's length, otherwise it could be too dangerous.
Brian MayI think that people like getting their money's worth, so it's cool to have a load of bands in a similar genre.
Tim LambesisIf 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.
Stephen MalkmusA lot of bands mature, which means they get square; they start delivering messages. Hey, you got a message, use Western Union.
David LeeA lot of other bands have tried to go out there and say we've got views on this and views on that. But some of it I've found opportunist. Duran Duran has always been honest about everything. We've always laid everything out.
Nick RhodesThere are some bands for whom that works very well and it's no disrespect to them because I'm sure there's something honest and natural about it, but for us I feel like it would be dishonest and kinda disrespectful to that artwork to do that. To be like: "Okay, we're going to go back and only play these songs, even though we have an hour to an hour and a half set and we gotta play more songs, but we'll skimp you on your extra half hour." That's just silly to me.
Patrick StumpWe wanted to offer something new to our audience. I hate it when bands stop taking chances.
Kirk Hammettin that small [time] most greatly lived this star of England: Fortune made his sword, By which the world's best garden he achiev'd And left it to his son imperial lord. Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crown'd King of France and England did this King succeed; Whose state so many of had the managing, That they lost France and made his England bleed.
William ShakespeareDonโt ask me why I obsessively look to rock โnโ roll bands for some kind of model for a better society. I guess itโs just that I glimpsed something beautiful in a flashbulb moment once, and perhaps mistaking it for prophecy have been seeking its fulfillment ever since.
Lester BangsI got fed up with being in bands. I spent a couple of years touring the country in a smoked filled band, doing lots of drugs and being really unhealthy.
Cliff MartinezBeing 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.
Neko CaseYeah, 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.
Bruce SpringsteenAfter watching a couple of live performances of bands like Nirvana, I was really excited and inspired by how raw and powerful it was. I wanted to at least aim in that direction with the guitar and do my own version of it. I know it doesn't really sound like that on the other end, but I wanted guitar, heavy rhythms, and singing to be the stamp of the whole thing.
Panda BearI 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.
Jello BiafraI've been in bands since I was about fifteen, so there are probably quite a lot of terrible teenage songs kicking about somewhere. I'm not sure what it was about to be honest, I think it was probably just something along the lines of teen angst.
Lauren MayberryI feel that bands can do whatever they want, after all, they own themselves and the art/music they create.
Jacob BannonMy dad, who plays guitar and piano and was in cover bands, along with my older brother, Matt, taught me guitar and stuff. I started writing acoustic songs and playing by myself in 7th grade.
Conor OberstSadly, I've seen a lot of bands hit that sort of peak and then eventually start supporting again, you know, which we will never do. We always put a lot of thought into the way that we are going to go, and we always change.
Glenn Tipton