A Quote by Billy Squier
Music is cyclical, but I've never thought of the music I make as being so off the wall or left field that it wouldn't always have an audience that would relate to it.
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We have an incredible audience. I'm as proud of how Fairport relates to its audience as I am of any music we have produced. I think we're a real people's band. Massive popular success has never bothered Fairport. We've never been put in the position of being celebrities. A Fairport concert is like a meeting of friends. There's no big, security wall around us. It's kind of how music should be.
I didn't know if it would be a successful one, or what the stages would be, but I always saw myself as a lifetime musician and songwriter...I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along...I'm a synthesist. I'm always making music. And I make a lot of different kinds of music all the time. Some of it gets finished and some of it doesn't...The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.
What I'm trying to do is make music that people relate to, that talks about ideas that are personal but also make that connection to trying to make revolutionary change, and I don't need to change my music to get to a certain audience.
That's always been the process of our music, in a sense, keeping it simple, not being so heavy that you are beating people over the head, it's just weighted down and it's like, "oohhh I can't relate." People are able to relate because we talked about things that everyone has experienced, it doesn't matter your race or genre. Music was your mainstay. There was something in our element of music that connected.
If we reject the word, or any word that labels music, what's left? That's the question we should all ask ourselves. Ben Ratliff asked it, and he came up with aesthetic categories. That's not what I would say. What's left are communities who make music together, or among whom music circulates. That's it.
I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said, 'You'll come to a wall you won't be able to get through.' So I said, 'I'll beat my head against that wall.'
What inspires me is the desire to be on. The desire to be successful. The desire to reach people through my music and make a living off it and never have to do anything else. Being able to do music full time and travel the world and share this music with everybody. That's the dream.
I would never really listen to my own music or whatever, but I write music so I can deal with things and I hope that some people can relate in that. Maybe help people, or just bring a smile to their face or make them feel cool or something.
I've always thought I crossed this really weird gap between the pop world and some slightly more left-field singer-songwriter music, but everyone's always comparing me with Ed Sheeran. It's frustrating.
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.
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.
The music is something outside myself that's also inside myself... Music and a sense of another presence always went hand in hand. Even when I was three, I would improvise music, and my maternal grandfather would act as an audience and used to applaud. I would imitate things like thunder and rain.
I never thought that I would pursue a cappella music. I went to Yale College and I was going to go into the medical field.
We [with Nimai Larson] listened to hardly any music except Hare Krishna music growing up and the occasional Garth Brooks that our babysitter would play for us. From a very early age, we looked at music as mantra based, very cyclical, and having no linear time.
I gave up that idea of trying to make music that I thought other people would want. I just made music for myself and music for people that I knew.
I think that ultimately, when you create music that is proper music, then it becomes fundamental and anyone can relate to it or connect to it. When done properly, the language doesn't really have anything to do with it. It's actually the music as a whole. When it is speaking truth, everyone can relate to that on a fundamental level.
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