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 hated it so much as a child. I just didn't like it when punk bands went metal, it really bothered me. It was happening left and right in the 1980s. It started I think with D.C. bands - G.I., Soul Side, they went metal. Right at that time, R.E.M. was coming out, these more kinda feminine bands, and I was more drawn to that than to go metal. And you remember MTV, with the bad metal. But even Metallica, it just wasn't my direction.

I'm 24, and a lot of people my age grew up listening to bands that were big and making it from around here. I was going to Flaming Lips and Chainsaw Kittens concerts when I was 12, and getting my mind blown at a young age... and maybe for people in bands, there's irreparable damage from those kind of things, and it turns out weirder bands.

I can show bands how to produce themselves. In the same way, many bands think you can't make it without some fat cat in London or New York to manage you. Thats just crap. All you need is someone a bit older than you with a bit of business nous whom you trust.

Playing live is a lost art, and you don't see a lot of bands that go out and play the way the older bands do. It's a celebration, and a lot of people treat it like a commercial or a distraction.

Some bands write and it is just the singer and the guitarist that do it all and then the rest of the band follows their vision. This is cool, and as you know I have been part of a few amazing bands that did this and I am not complaining.

When I get 13 or 14 years old, I get crazy with rock music, like, like, deeply crazy. And one of my favorite bands at that moment was, for example, like - bands like Metallica or Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd and Santana, you know? And then I start to play metal, actually, when I was - at the age of 15.

I think you can realise that a lot of people in bands - well - I guess you kinda wanna... There's a lot less mystique in playing in a rock band today, than in the 60's or 70's. I don't think there's any bands that I can think of, that have this rock god myth that like Led Zeppelin had.

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.

I got my influences from 70s bands - Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, blah blah blah. When I was growing up, we had all these crazy bands on the Top 40. Today, if Pink Floyd released "Money", it wouldn't even get played.

My 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.

I 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.

Contemporary bands often will do tour-only releases pressed and sold only in Australia. Crikey!

I never went to rock concerts when I was a kid. I didn't see any rock & roll 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've sung background for a couple of bands.

I can imagine for some bands the ability to make your sound and make your identity known could be challenging.

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.

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.

So it was out of necessity that Blackheart was born. I think it's great that now, 25 years later, we're not only putting out our own music, but are able to put out music by other bands. That's really exciting for us.

Some of my favourites... there's the classics like Blur and Oasis and Pulp, Suede and The Charlatans, The La's, The Smiths, The Cure, stuff like that. That was a huge part of my teen-years and bands I still listen to right through to this day, but it had a huge bearing on me as a teen and it was some of my favourite music, and is still to this day some of my favourite music.

Have pride and entertainment. I think that a lot bands just don't know how to do it anymore or they lost interest in it or don't care and are just cashing a paycheck.

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

I 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.

Christian music has taken a turn towards worship music, which has turned into a lot of bands and those types of sounds. That's great. God is using that stuff and it's great.

People are like, 'What do you mean you don't listen to 115 different types of music?'. You can't just listen to The Smiths anymore. But then there are plenty of people that do only listen to five bands and six albums and that's it. My playlists are massively varied. There's never a theme throughout, it's never like everything is based in funk or based in reggae or whatever. It's 210BPM gabber-style techno and 40BPM reggae in the same list and it's like, yeah, they work.

The only Train song I like is the one that I play in my act "Drops Of Jupiter". Sheryl Crow has three or four songs that I like; also Dave Matthews Band. With those particular musicians, it's more that there are a few songs that I like rather than their entire body of work. There are a lot of indie bands that I like too. I'm not a snob about music. Does the fact that I like Stephen Sondheim and Broadway musicals make me a fake? Does the fact that I'm "the Billy Joel of comedy" mean that I don't have indie-rock credibility?

I had a band called the Sound Of Love and that was R&B songs about girls in my high school. I played in some other indie bands who were trying to make it big; those sucked. Then I started Makeout Videotape and that was that.

All bands are in danger of losing their identity. Constantly.

My entire education in music was in reading interviews with bands like Stereolab and finding out about Brazilian music or a Romanian composer. You expose yourself to what people you look up to admire.

Bands that I've loved over the years are the ones that have a certain myth around them.

This man is freed from servile bands, Of hope to rise, or fear to fall; Lord of himself, though not of lands, And leaving nothing, yet hath all.

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.

Writing is very improvisational. It's like trying to fix a broken sewing machine with safety pins and rubber bands. A lot of tinkering.

I think the Cosmic Psychos were a band that was highly influential on the Seattle so called grunge scene. I know that Kurt and Nirvana were fans, they played shows with Pearl Jam. Even thou the Cosmic Psychos never had the commercial impact or success that those bands had, they were still a major influence on them, and I think a lot of it had to do with the spirit and the sound of their music.

There's also a lot of gritty Americana type of bands. I actually have a lot of Britpop on my iPod, too.

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.

Rock'n'roll as a genre is different from pop and hip hop: it is about bands, and that for me suggests brotherhood, family, friendship and community.

I'll tell you what I hate - bands like My Chemical Romance.

It happened to be, from '73 to '78, the five years that, our most glorious years for bass players. We had Larry Graham, with his own band, Stanley Clarke with his own band. We have Bootsy doing his thing. We had Jaco Pastorius. They were all leading their own bands.

Sometimes it's just the creative intent of an artist or band that inspires me. I'm generally drawn to artists or bands that put themselves out on a limb somewhat and do something that infuriates both the mainstream and the indie purists, but that can't necessarily be classed as either. To me it seems somewhat convenient to be on either end of that scale.

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

I really loved music and went to a lot of clubs to see bands and dance. I loved going out.

Love that so many of you are saying your 2 fav bands are Green Day & Paramore. Do you even realize how cool that is for us to hear!?

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

There must be bands of enthusiasts for everything on earth-fanatics who shared a vocabulary, a batch of technical skills and equipment, and, perhaps, a vision of some single slice of the beauty and mystery of things, of their complexity, fascination, and unexpectedness.

It's pretty easy to lose money on tour - most bands do on their first couple of tours. We're more established, but I think it was just poorly booked. It was a mess from the get-go.

Most bands people have side projects and it's not considered a death threat as it was say, with The Beatles.