A Quote by Burt Bacharach

I started playing piano with a little band in high school. I was terrible. I thought I had absolutely no talent. I couldn't keep time. I only got into McGill, which was a lousy music school, because they were taking American music students.
I started piano lessons at age six but didn't take music seriously until I was a teenager, when I thought about a career in music. I studied classical music, and my instruments were guitar and piano. I played keyboards in bands, and after high school I went to Vienna to study at the Academy of Music. I also became a session player, which culminated in my work with Tangerine Dream.
The first music-learning thing that I took seriously was piano lessons when I was a kid. I guess that was probably the only time that I was forced to perform music, because I had piano recitals, and my school also had mandatory music classes that had some performing required.
I started playing piano and guitar when I was in elementary school, and then I was finally like, 'I want to sing.' So I started taking voice lessons and decided I wanted to go to an art school and take music seriously.
I started playing piano when I was eight, and I went on to study piano in school, so I have a background in classical piano and studied composition in school. Writing music came later.
That movie [Jawbreaker] was so much fun to shoot. We were all in our mid-20s at the time, playing high school students. Which was the point. It was the point of the film to hire older actors to play high school students. But we had a blast.
My mom tells this story that even when I was in the womb, my father played the piano and she sang. So, before I officially got here, I was already surrounded by music. I also like the way my father explains it. When I was about 3-years old, in order to keep me quiet, my father would put me in the bassinet and either put on some music or play the piano. When he started playing, I got quiet and eventually went to sleep. He said by the time I turned 3, I just climbed up on the piano and started playing it with the attitude of I'm gonna play dis here piano.
The only thing I could do was play music, because I'd studied classical guitar, trumpet and piano at the American School in Alexandria. So I started out with two other boys in little clubs in Athens. I became a singer by default when our lead vocalist was late one night. Someone had to sing.
When I was growing up, in L.A., I went to these schools, Fairfax High School, Bancroft Junior High School, and they had great music departments. I always played in the orchestra, the jazz band, the marching band.
I was trying to become a legitimate trumpet player, and I had a scholarship to Eastman School of Music. I was really on my way. But I didn't take the scholarship. I got sidetracked, because when summers came around, I started playing with a rock-and-roll band.
At school there were some programs in music. I did take piano lessons, and we had a piano at home. I got very interested in that.
In high school I was in a band called Goodfight, but it was more me running around on stage. It was very punk inspired. Then I started to get into indie-rock and older music and decided I wanted to write my own stuff. I quit the band. Around 16 or 17, I started recording myself at home on keyboard and piano.
I was basically 18 when I got offered to join Mister Valentine band and go on tour and leave high school. I was pretty stoked on that, but the band wasn't really my style so after like six months of playing with them I decided to play with the aesthetic of a DIY hardcore band playing pop music. That was the original idea.
I was in every band class I could get in, like after school jazz band and marching band, and that's where I really learned to read music from elementary all the way through junior high and high school.
I just started as a part of the public school music program. I took lessons at the school every Friday and was a part of the school band. I was just a normal kid taking instrumental lessons at school, nothing special.
There were only 75 people in my graduating class at the school I attended in Hannah, S.C. It was a small school and that translated into not a lot of opportunities when it came to music. We had academic and sports programs but we never had a consistent music program. We would have a band one year, and a chorus one year, but nothing ever lasted.
I read a lot - surveys of vernacular music. A lot of it is the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music, which I've loved since I was in high school. They had it at the library and I always thought that was interesting, even when I was into punk and stuff. Just the history of storytelling and the amount of melancholy a lot of old music has.
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