A Quote by Leo Kottke

Yeah I do and I don't mind, in fact that is one of the real encouraging things about this whole career of mine is that there are tunes I wrote almost thirty years ago that I will still play in front of an audience and I still like the old tunes.
I like to play things that people understand, or maybe tunes that they could recognize. And so — I play for the people, just as much as for myself. Because, as I say, I still like to play.
I'm still kind of a hapless character in my everyday life. But when it comes to the writing, my influences are very old influences. I love American music of absolutely all stripes, including show tunes, advertising jingles, theme tunes from quiz shows, all kinds of American music.
I do very few standards. Hardly any. Other people's tunes that I do are usually obscure tunes, for the most part, although I do a couple of Duke Ellington tunes that are well known.
I have tons of tunes, maybe 30 tunes that I still think are great, and only because some jerk at a record company didn't think it was great, it's not out there.
My tunes and numbers are here. They have filled my years, the years when I refused to die. And in order to do that I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, at noon or 3:00 A.M. So as not to be dead.
My third day playing saxophone, I was in front of a congregation. I still didn't know the names of all the notes. I was playing by ear, following along, but it was such an encouraging environment, I couldn't fail. It was all, 'Yeah baby, you sound real good' no matter what you play. It was a great way to learn.
Blue grass was the outgrowth of Irish music. As a matter of fact a lot the tunes, a lot of the melodies and the jigs... have different names but are actually the same tunes.
People have to realise you don't help African children singing along to 60-year-old men playing their tunes from 40 years ago.
I do catch myself driving around singing tunes, but I don't know if it's necessarily show tunes.
Working in bars back then, in the '50s, to get a job you had to play all kinds of music. There'd be customers come in and yell jazz tunes at you and yell rock 'n' roll tunes at you and polkas and rhythm and blues and country music.
Our tunes aren't just sing-along tunes: they're very complex. After a few days of that, you gotta take a break.
I'm not an original composer. The tunes are not stolen from other tunes necessarily except in a few cases, but they're in the style of songs that I grew up with.
The fact that you can take LEGO bricks from thirty years ago and they still snap together with the same new LEGO brick that comes out, I mean what type of product can span generations like that, there is something really special to it.
There is a strange fact about the human mind, a fact that differentiates the mind sharply from the body. The body is limited in ways that the mind is not. One sign of this is that the body does not continue indefinitely to grow in strength and develop in skill and grace. By the time most people are thirty years old, their bodies are as good as they will ever be; in fact, many persons' bodies have begun to deteriorate by that time. But there is no limit to the amount of growth and development that the mind can sustain. The mind does not stop growing at any particular age.
It is amazing that something I did 23 years ago still has an audience that people respond to and I am touched and surprised that people are still very positive about.
I suppose I could think of a lot of things to say about the fact that I still play. But I don't really need to. I can tell you this, that I enjoy it. I still enjoy it. I like to get out in the air and I like to walk and I like to do the things that are involved in playing golf.
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