A Quote by Henry Rollins
I'm not a singer. If you've heard any of my records, that's not singing. I have no vocal qualities whatsoever. I've got a lot of enthusisam and I go to the cross, but there's no skill going on there. It's more just intuitiveness.
Related Quotes
I was 16 years old, and I was just flailing around, looking for an interest. I heard, you know, these jazz records. They were modern records, at the time in the '50s, and I realized that I didn't fully get what was going on. But I liked a lot of what I heard.
Singing is a kind of sport and a singer a kind of athlete and following this model becoming "vocally fit" - building vocal muscles - should be the point of any form of voice teaching. Other approaches don't work directly on building vocal muscles but instead focus on so-called diaphragm support and breathing, mask singing, breath control, throat relaxation - all of which are useless at best and harmful at worst.
I was going to be a singer. If I hadn't been in my profession, I was going to be an Opera singer. That's from a young kid. I had all these records from all those famous Opera singers. I wanted to be an Opera singer - that was my whole thing and physical fitness got in the way, thank God.
I think I understand what bands want, just from having made records myself. I understand what it takes to get a good vocal sound, or to make people comfortable in the studio. From minor things like their headphone mix - and if a singer's singing, how they should hear themselves - to how to make people feel that they're getting exactly what they want. All those things, I think, are an advantage, especially the part about having done it myself. I'm not just an engineer who records the sounds well. I'm not afraid to take chances.
When I write a song and come up with an arrangement and a vocal part, it's always a challenge trying to find a singer who can interpret it sort of the way that I hear it, and it's a very difficult thing to do. I mean, singing is like playing an instrument - everybody does it a little bit different - singing maybe even more so.
I've always been singing. Since day one. I started doing musical theater and you have to sing in musical theater and so that's where I got most of my training. So singing on stage, you just inevitably, when you're around other vocal artists, you get better at singing.
I write a lot of more instrumental music than I do vocal music. It's because I come out of a background of playing piano and then playing sax for a number of years. I kind of got into rock backwards. A lot of guys go into rock and then get sick of it and then go into something else. I came the other way, so I've always just had a lot more stuff lying around.
'In My Hands,' the title track, is my very first vocal attempt, and I'm not a singer as such. But I've always wanted to express myself vocally on my albums, and I don't really have much of a capability for singing. The strength is in, I think, the lyrics and just speaking. It just comes from inside.
In my first bands I was a singing guitar player, but if you heard any of those songs you wouldn't describe me as a singer. But I can make it work.
Now, I'm fully aware that there is only one figure more pitiable, more ludicrous, more inherently ridiculous than a bad singer who keeps on singing, and that's a bad singer who keeps on singing because he has issues.
When people ask me, 'Are you a singer?' I say, 'No, I'm not a 'singer' - but I love the craft of singing,' going in and finding out what that means or why the hell I'm singing in the first place. My thing is really the craft of it.
Just as we were finishing 'Paul's Boutique' we got our own places, and I was going out to clubs a lot less. I got a bit more introverted and spent a lot more time on my own reading. I would just go down to the esoteric bookstore and wander around.
I've made solo records and that's all been a learning experience. I've just got better at singing and more comfortable with who I am and my voice.
I think I've been influenced by everything I've ever heard. The first thing I ever heard was my grandma, who was an opera singer. The first song I ever learned was the 'Nessun Dorma' from Puccini's 'Turandot.' My father was a big band singer, so I used to hear him walking around the house singing standards all the time.
I came from being a singer going into jazz. And that's one of the things that polio did for me is it took away my ability to sing with a range because it paralyzed my vocal chords, so that was when I started playing. But I hear the music as if I were singing even when I am playing.
I've put out records over the years, whether it's with Blackfield or No-Man or Bass Communion or Porcupine Tree, that are pop records, ambient records, metal records, singer-songwriter records.
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