A Quote by Dave Matthews
I hope that just what I sing about and how I relate to my audience is as much of a political statement as I need to make.
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You can't worry too much about what you think the audience wants to hear. You just have to hope that you're a likeable enough person that what you're saying will relate to other people, so they can laugh at it as well.
I just really need to sing and sing and sing and not worry about writing. Just by singing for pleasure, your voice takes you to what it wants to sing. And that is how the best stuff kind of emerges.
When I see an entire community disenfranchised, it disturbs me. Not that I'm a message guy, per se. I write about people. I like to write about human beings, not crap political rhetoric. I've tried to avoid that all my life. When I wrote about soldiers in Vietnam, I wasn't trying to make a political statement. I was trying to write about how screwed things were for soldiers, and how they still are.
I am particular about the seating of the audience - also about how much money they pay - but most of all where they are seated. If I am going to sing something intimate, who am I going to sing it to?
How we dress is, as far as I can tell, the only inescapably public choice that we have. People don't need to know what you eat, people don't need to know who you have sex with. But there's no escaping what you wear and the fact that you've chosen it. Even if you insist that you don't care about fashion, that's your statement. It's really one realm of life where you are forced to make your own statement.
Tell ya what I'm gonna do, see. I'm not going to hope. Now, you don't either. Don't hope your life will get better. Just make it so. Don't hope you are able to handle this baby. Just do it. Just be glad, just move fast, just do what you need to do. But for god's sake, don't hope. Just be...Just be.
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.
I think the private sector for the most part, the vast majority of employers in America, they wake up in the morning, and they have a bottom line. This is how much they make, this is how much their expenses are; they certainly need to break even just to stay in business, and they need to make a profit in order to survive long-term.
Most people are excited about themselves. Personal genome will deliver for inexpensively something about science to which you can relate. Just like computers are becoming something to which you can relate. It should be even easier to relate to your own biology, and I hope that will be one of the ways we get broader literacy in science.
The things we sing about are timeless. Political affairs and social situations come and go. But if you're singing about empowerment and not playing by the rules, you can sing about them until you can't sing anymore.
Every once in a while an issue comes up where I have to make a statement. I can't totally avoid all political issues, but I try my best to minimize them. When I do make a statement, I try to be fairly neutral.
What happened on "As Cool As I Am" was, you know how in the `90s, "the personal is political, the political is personal"? That was a really big thing. Choices you made about how you recorded and what instruments you used and how much real versus how much synthetic. Those were choices that were seen as very political at the time.
When I think about how I want to reach an audience, I just wanted to make pieces that were inspired by something that gave me so much pleasure.
Audience interest is directly proportionate to the presenter's preparation. You better spend time and energy on any presentations where the stakes are high. If you are trying to close a large sale or speak at a conference to an audience of potential clients, you better be ON your game. An audience can tell how much energy you spent on your presentation, which is a reflection of how much you valued their time. If they gave you an hour of their time, you need to make it worth it to them by treating their time as a valuable asset by making the content valuable to them.
It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.
A human being at rest runs on 90 watts. That's how much power you need just to lie down. And if you're a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, you'll need about 250 watts. That's how much energy it takes to run about and find food.
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