A Quote by J Tillman

If my peers had a significant impact on my music, my music would probably be a lot more popular. — © J Tillman
If my peers had a significant impact on my music, my music would probably be a lot more popular.
I was interested in a whole range of music that I used to play, popular music -- particularly American music -- that I heard a lot of when I was a teenager," "I think at a certain point it dawned on me that myself playing this music wasn't very convincing. It was more convincing when we played music that came from our own stock of tradition. ... I certainly feel a lot more comfortable playing so-called Celtic music.
I only knew classical music, which to me was the only true music. The only way I could survive at the bar was to mix the classical music with popular songs, and that meant I had to sing. What happened was that I discovered I had a voice plus the talent to mix classical music together with more popular songs, which at the time I detested.
Popular music of the last 50 years has failed to keep in step with advances in musical theater, namely Stephen Sondheim. But the two have grown apart so that popular music is based more than ever on a rhythmic grid that is irrelevant in musical theater. In popular music, words matter less and less. Especially now that it's so international, the fewer words the better. While theater music becomes more and more confined to a few blocks in midtown.
I would say that 'Creed' has a lot more music in it. It's 60 minutes of music, while 'Fruitvale' had about a fourth of that at best. There's a bigger focus in 'Creed' because I had to make music for training montages.
A lot of Utah State when I was there, there was a lot of California guys. So, you get a lot of Cali music, you got a lot of dance music, I think the Jerk was popular back then. It was a lot of the music that you can dance to with your teammates. A lot of hip-hop, rap, R&B, it was really fun. It was live in there.
I want people to feel what it was like in the '40s. That's when popular music in the United States was so beautiful. Frank Sinatra, the Pied Pipers, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holiday. That's when popular music had deeper values, to me. This was music that was selling millions of records.
Music is the highest art form.I still think that. I wish I was really talented in music because then I would be doing it. I felt that I could write a decent song, but it was a big struggle. It took a lot of time and effort for me, whereas a lot of my peers and other people seemed to have a much easier relationship to it. But I profoundly love music, and I still dream that I might one day try to write some new songs and record something - just for myself, to see what would happen.
I'm trying to fuse popular and commercial music and just make very creative music. It's popular music: it's everything for everybody.
When I was a kid, pre-1994 was still apartheid, so we didn't get a lot the subversive music from the States or from the U.K. A lot of the music we would get was the poppiest pop music, so I've never really had a bad association it.
It's easy to get next to music theory, especially between your peers and music classes and so forth. You just pay attention. I had a good ear, so I realized that printed music was just about reminding you what to play.
I feel a vocabulary in my music that is coming from popular music. Popular music is like the mother of all languages.
I had seen a lot of music movies that celebrated music or that showed the kind of joys from playing music, which is a big part of it of course, and not something that I would want to deny.
For me, personally, the most interesting music comes from the popular sector - from film and pop music - since contemporary classical music got stuck and went into directions where it lost a lot of the public by over-intellectualizing.
Early American music and early folk music, before the record became popular and before there were pop stars and before there were venues made to present music where people bought tickets, people played music in the community, and it was much more part of a fabric of everyday life. I call that music 'root music.'
I turn on the radio now and I don't have anything against a lot of sequenced and programmed and electronic music, a lot of it is dope and it's the future. It's what popular music has evolved to.
When I was growing up, music was music and there were no genres. We didn't look at it as country music. Popular music in Tuskegee was country music. So I didn't know it in categories. It was the radio.
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