Quotes About Music

If you listen to soul music, or R&B music, or Blues music, a lot of that came from church music and spiritual music, and music has always been a really really powerful tool that people have used to get them closer to God - whatever they define God as. And for me that's always been part of what drew me to it and keeps me coming back for more.

Indie music is 'it' now. It's kind of a revolution to the music: 1980s, 1990s music was getting very sanitized; they were complying with the music industry. Music was getting more and more dead in a way. Now, because of the social climate that's very severe, the artists are compelled to start being real. It's really great that indie music is now.

Irish music is guts, balls and feet music, yeah? It's frenetic dance music, yeah? Or it's impossibly sad like slow music, yeah? Yeah? And it also handles all sorts of subjects, from rebel songs to comical songs about sex, you know what I mean, yeah? Which I don't think people realize how much innuendo there is in Irish music.

There are many fans of hard rock music that have been wrongly pigeonholed as apathetic. This music is not music for the elitist coffeehouse culture in SoHo. It' s rock 'n' roll music for kids across the land, and I think that makes it much more subversive in a way, in that it has the form and the function of a powerful, populist music, but it can carry very incendiary messages.

I'm obsessed - not just interested, obsessed - with folk music, street music, the parallels between a country's street music and its so-called classical and intellectual music, the way certain scales have travelled right across the globe. All this ethnological and musical interaction fascinates me. Have you heard any trance music? That's the thing.

That’s why I make music. When I listen to my favorite music made by other people, that’s what it does to me. So as a musician, I’m just trying to do the same thing with music I make. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But when someone comes to me and says the music I’ve made has affected them emotionally, that’s the most gratifying part of my job.

I love commercial music! I can dissect it and criticize it with any critic in the business. But without any thought, I just enjoy it. It's folk music. That's what I'm doing, folk music. I'm not intellectualizing it . . . and making it into a phoney art form. I'm just doing the music I enjoy.

In an odd way I thought I was lowering the bar for myself, in saying, well, I'll make a pop album. But in a way it's kind of harder to make pop music. It's like the more abstract you get with music, you get into that emperor's new clothes thing, where you can go anywhere, and just claim that your audience may not be prepared to go with you. But with pop music, I think everybody understands the form, everybody knows what it's meant to do. So I would say it's harder to write that kind of music.

The dilemma of the eighth-grade dance is that boys and girls use music in different ways. Girls enjoy music they can dance to, music with strong vocals and catchy melodies. Boys, on the other hand, enjoy music they can improve by making up filthy new lyrics.

One of the things I always underscore when I teach criticism is that young critics, or would be critics, frequently have this illusion that if they write about music they're somehow part of music, or if they write about movies they're part of movies, or of they write about theater they're part of theater, or write about literature. Writing is a part of literature, we belong the species of literature. If you add all the music reviews together that have ever been written, they don't create two notes of music.

I actually quit music and I thought maybe I chose the wrong career. But, I isolated myself in a cabin in the woods for a while and that's where I fell back in love with music. Just being isolated out there, eliminating all these opinions that I endured during my time in LA and the music industry, all the rejection, it was really hard on me and my creativity. So by isolating myself in the wilderness, I was able to fall back in love with music. It was always ingrained in me, always in my blood, but I just lost it for a minute.

I play music - I write my own music, but I play music, just background music really, and just let it happen.

As a composer I might class myself as a Neo-Romantic, inasmuch as I have always regarded music as a highly personal and emotional form of expression. I like to write music which takes its inspiration from poetry, art and nature. I do not care for purely decorative music. Although I am in sympathy with modern idioms, I abhor music which attempts nothing more than the illustration of a stylistic fad. And in using modern techniques, I have tried at all times to subjugate them to a larger idea or a grander human feeling.

Rock and roll came in and changed my life and changed the whole music scene forever, and then I grew to love R&B and Motown and all black music, gospel music. But I never dismiss any form of music. I listen to everything.

Music is generally important to blind people, and most of the blind people that I have come into contact, through my parents, music is very special to them. Obviously, because it is more salient, you know? We might like going to the movies, and of course we like music too, but when the eyes don't work then the ears pick up slack. Music is all the sweeter at that point.

You listen to a politician making a speech, and it is like hearing nothing. Whereas, music is unmistakably music. The thing about music is that nobody listens to it unless it's real. I don't think that you can fool anybody for too long in music. And you certainly can't fool everybody.

I just love Cape Breton fiddling! I think it's very close. They derive their music from Scottish music. Well, in Donegal we're very influenced by Scottish music as well. Independently the two areas became very alike, because they kind of changed the music a bit from Scotland and we did the same.

I think music should be free. I think all communication should be free. I think people should respect artists, and there should be a certain respect for artists who give their music away for free. If your music winds up on Napster and you approve of it, then the person downloading your music should at least go to your concert, should at least purchase your songs.

You can't say that people don't love music anymore because they do. If we say that all the music stopped, if music stops now, the world can't handle that. We need our music.

Livin' la Vida Loca' is not Latin music. It does not represent Latin music what Jennifer Lopez put out. It's not Latin music. What Enrique Iglesias, it's not Latin music, no? It's Latin artists. There's a Latin artist doing it you could say.

I'm not sure if music got a future. We have all these electronic ways to download and steal music and get music, but there's no money in makin' music.

Music is my passion so I feel like I'll be doing this for a long time and God forbid if anything happens I'll still write music. So, I could write music for other people. I see myself making music for a very long time.

Through the music and words we, as the band The ex, express our thoughts and opinions and ideas. It is not always totally necessary for our audience to clearly hear and understand every line I sing. The power and impact, the positive energy of the music are as much part of the whole thing as the words. We are not trying to convert people, but we believe in our music and like to play it in front of other people, hoping that we can get them as excited as we are about our music.

If politically infused music is denied airplay, music reviews or festival stage time because it is considered "politics" rather than "art", then there will be no music left to ban. It will never reach the surface anyway, not to the larger audience. I believe that there is a high degree of censorship in the west, most importantly in the form of self-censorship among musicians themselves. This is why what you hear on the radio is - increasingly often - pure and toothless entertainment. Almost by definition, there's nothing left in pop music worth banning.

Above all else, [Benny Goodman] was a great player, one of the greatest American music has produced. He brought his absolute talent and his invincible love of music to the fore every time he played. There are many other things connected to society and ethnicity that are often mentioned in a discussion of Benny Goodman but all of them are connected to his overwhelming affection for the art of the music and the fairness it should be allowed to express.

The way I make music is just a reflection of how I think music should be made. Where you sit in a studio, and you make music, and you use technology to your advantage, not to hide all the blaring mistakes.

However, I have a lot of greed. The types of music I want to show are on this side and on that side. Conclusively, if I'm able to make good music and people continue to look for my music, won't this kind of controversy get better... is my thought.

I came up during that time when music, to me, was really music. It wasn't about talking about a woman and calling them a derogatory name or something like that. It was real music.

My earliest memories about music are connected with going to church and listening to organ music. I am not from a musical family, actually, and I remember my first musical fascination to be for organ music. I wanted to become an organist and not a pianist.

I teach a graduate seminar called "Theorizing Improvisation" that is pretty interdisciplinary, but really makes students deal with black studies seriously. A lot of authors of color, a lot of women of color - those become central to the intellectual trajectory. It considers music, but it also considers areas of thought that might seem unrelated to music. That's partly because we're expanding the notion of what music is beyond objects, beyond scores, beyond things.

Well, one is inspired by the whole of life, one's own and somebody else's. You know how sometimes you hear great music, and music is completely untranslatable into words, into any words. A certain tension that is born when one listens to music could aid you in expressing something absolutely different.

I've only had a sit-down encounter with Robert once, and that one conversation was the best advice that I have gotten from any individual in the music industry. R Kelly told me that as long as I write life and not music I will always have a job. He listened to several of my records and told me that they were great records and for that to come from a man who has produced hit after hit gave me a comfort and reassurance that making honest and good music was not in vain.

Music is the medium for expressing emotion. Music kindles love and infuses hope. It has countless voices and instruments. Music is in the hearts of all men and women

It was a natural thing for me to go become a musician, and then to start writing music. I don't even really remember making a decision to go into music, it was just there for me, always. If I weren't making a living at it, I'd still be writing music.

Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.

My music has always been the same. It's the same kinda music but of a better quality. For me nothing really changes just the work rate. It's the work rate that changes more than the music.

Today, music is great for entertainment, but it is lacking soul; it's lacking substance, and it's difficult to find good stuff. There are too many corporate interests. It's not about the actual music because it's about the corporation, and music just becomes part of a package.

Music always stimulates my imagination. When I'm writing I usually have some Baroque music on low in the background chamber music by Bach, Telemann, and the like.

Music is a weapon of the future / music is the weapon of the progressives / music is the weapon of the givers of life

Music is a plane of wisdom, because music is a universal language, it is a language of honor, it is a noble precept, a gift of the Airy Kingdom, music is air, a universal existence common to all the living.

"St. Lucia We Love" is actually a song produced by Stratosphere music (also St. Lucian). The CEO of Stratosphere music approached me and wanted me to produce a music video for this song which was already a hit in my country. I felt privileged to have been chosen to do such a video. So every time I went out to shoot a scene from the video, I would get a still shot from the scene to tease the public. The photo of the amazona versicolor is is an actual scene from the video which was released on St. Lucia's Independence day (22nd February, 2013).

A lot of people think that the music was responsible for a lot of changes in the Sixties, but I think the music came out of it. The music wouldnt have happened without the social changes.

We always need to have someone help with videos, I think all of our DVDs could've been better but our music video, I love all the music videos, but the actual behind-the-scenes and stuff of our music video DVD, it was rushed and didn't turn out great.

Music should be healing. Music should uplift the soul. Music should inspire.

It started so early, it all runs together. But what made a huge impact on me was when I went to Europe at 15 or 16 years old. All I knew before that was music on the radio and TV. When I went over there I realized there are all different levels of music. There are people who do blues, jazz, classical, working in film, TV and all kinds of places. You might not see them on MTV but there are lots of needs and uses and opportunities for all kinds of music.

It'd be negligent to say that I don't want to be at the top of the charts. Of course I do, it's proof that your song is being heard. But I think it's more about the work for me and being proud of what I'm doing in music than what people think about my music. I want to like my music before you like it. I don't want to sell anything that I don't really like. I don't want to sell myself short just to get to the top of the charts. It doesn't feel that great. Feeling proud of your work feels greater than being at the top of the charts.

My goal is to live the truly religious life, and express it in my music. If you live it, when you play there's no problem because the music is part of the whole thing. To be a musician is really something. It goes very, very deep. My music is the spiritual expression of what I am - my faith, my knowledge, my being.

I don't know if there was really ever a golden age of the music business. Most of what was released has always been garbage and some has been able to get through and last. I don't know that it was much better thirty years ago. The music industry just wasn't as efficient. The music industry was more oddball guys who did it for fun and now they are huge corporations that have become more structured.