Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American musician Adam Jones.
Last updated on December 14, 2024.
Adam Thomas Jones is an American musician and visual artist, best known as the guitarist for Tool. Jones has been rated the 75th-greatest guitarist of all time by the Rolling Stone and placed ninth in Guitar World's Top 100 Greatest Metal Guitarists. With experience in special effects and set design in the Hollywood film industry, Jones is also the director of the majority of Tool's music videos.
We're more into expressing ourselves than making radio hits.
I'm not a geek about equipment, I just know what I like.
There's always the influence of music, film, art and the other things that drive me. I'm usually inspired by my environment and whatever is making me happy or mad.
We have meetings with our record label to tell them how to market us.
I'm not into solos, I'm into lyrics.
In the time between records, I always have lots of stuff going on. I shoot photography, make little sculptures, play video games.
All the art for Tool is done by the me and the band.
Fine art is really something I want to get into.
I really like stuff that is collectible that you can hold and go, 'There's only a few people that have this.' I like to see that someone's put a lot of labor into making something.
As long as I can remember, growing up we had a guitar around our house, and I was always plucking on it.
That's what I love about our music - it'll never be a hit because you can't dance to it.
I never thought 'Stairway to Heaven' was a long song. I loved how there was this part and then there was another part that was completely different.
I like soundtracks and I like film.
I think people like Steve Vai are so boring.
I'm a self-taught guitarist, but I have a classical music background.
I think putting labels on people is just an easy way of marketing something you don't understand.
I use Gibson guitars; I prefer the Les Paul custom.
Doing the stereotypical solo bores me.
Different people get different things out of the images. It doesn't matter what it's about, all that matters is how it makes you feel.
My approach is to be part of a band that makes music, not hit songs.
Many of the songs on Undertow were written at the time Opiate came out.
When you don't know what the band looks like, it puts the emphasis on thinking and taking the music and message more seriously.
I played violin and got into that Suzuki program in the second grade.
I'm my own worst critic and I think everyone in the band is a perfectionist.
I personally don't like to use as many effects because when you play live, something always goes wrong.
If I play anything that sounds like a solo, it's gonna sound like a lyric.
We could have gone with much bigger labels and more money, but we wanted to go with a company that is LA based, all in the same building, and really understands what the artists want.
We wanted to take as much time and effort making the video as we did the song.
I've never worried about how long the song is.
With four perfectionists in the band, we have a hard time reaching perfection.
Everyone in Tool is interested in how we present our music. We write a group of songs that have a vibe, energy and feeling, and then we try to pick an image to capture that and communicate a feeling. We want something that adds to the connection with the audience.
I've always been involved in the visual arts and music.
If you're making music for all the right reasons, people are going to be receptive to that and appreciate it the same way you did when your were writing it.
I haven't listened to much music lately; I've been out of it.
I mean, Tool has a style, but we try to make all our songs sound different from each other.
The Melvins are grunge.
As far as the grunge thing, there are three bands from Seattle that I would call true grunge.
I'm not a good guitar player.
But if you want to be in a band and write music, then you should just be in a band and write music.
I seriously do not think Nirvana is grunge.
I'm a bass player from way back and Paul is a guitar player and we've been in many bands.
When we played with the Rollins Band, we'd keep songs going until we felt like ending it.
I listen to Helmet - and I love Helmet, they're a great band - but every song sounds the same.
That's the thing I like about my sound. It's real raw and very unsafe compared to a solid state kind of sound.
I've always dabbled on guitar, but never took lessons.