A Quote by Michael Stipe

When I hear music as a fan, I see fields. I see landscapes. I close my eyes and see an entire universe that that music and the voice, or the narrative, create. A music video-and any other kind of visual reference-is created by someone else.
I can see myself retiring from rapping, but I don't think from music. After that, I think I'd just go into some other kind of music, 'cuz I'm a worldwide fan of music, all types of music, all cultures, so I'll always be involved.
I feel like I can see the music and can see how the character of the music actually flows. For me, that's music to my eyes.
I see my music as a visual thing. When I'm on stage I am very expressive with my face and through my performance - kind of like an actress but not really, it just rises up from inside with the music.
Free music, to me, is music without boundaries. It's music that... says you don't have to play a blues in three chord change. See what I'm saying? Music that can go from any range.
A lot of times I have the song inside of me and I have to fight to get it out. I'm a very visual person, so I can see the song but I can't hear it. But I think that if your music becomes a war for it to happen, in the end there's a certain kind of aggression in the music. And I think that's a lot more interesting.
When I hear music, it's visual; I see things.
I envy the music lovers hear. I see them walking hand in hand, standing close to each other in a queue at a theater or subway station, heads touching while they sit on a park bench, and I ache to hear the song that plays between them: The stirring chords of romance's first bloom, the stately airs that whisper between a couple long in love. You can see it in the way they look at each other... you can almost hear it. Almost, but not quite, because the music belongs to them and all you can have of it is a vague echo that rises up from the bittersweet murmur and shuffle of your own memories.
I have a music-video background, and I feel like the responsibility of a music-video director is to do something that hasn't been done before in a really cool visual way. So much innovation has come in filmmaking through music videos.
If I don't see a music video to it while writing it, I just scrap it immediately. It's very visual.
I wanted to create this dialogue between music and visual art and vice versa. No matter what part of the spectrum they fill, whether it's visual, music, or whatever, artists are interested in other art forms. Your brain is already kind of firing in that way.
I'd been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it's environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this 'ambient music.' But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.
Just look at what is right in front of you. People don't do that. They see what they expect to see, what they want to see, what conventional wisdom tells them to see. They only hear the music and not the lyrics of human events.
There were two things I discovered when I toured with Snoop. One was that the band was all jazz musicians. The second was to instil in me a respect for other styles of music. From then on, whenever I played a new kind of music, I came with the same kind of open mind. What are they trying to do? What are they hearing? How do they see music?
The older I've gotten, the more I've gotten a little precious about music-related films as it comes to biopics. I kind of don't want to see it; I'd rather see a documentary. And this is just coming from me. I love music documentaries; I kind of don't want to see people embodying those people.
It's emotion. When you are watching a movie you see a woman sitting with her daughter and looking in her eyes and you see butterflies flying in the background and then you suddenly hear scary movie music and it changes the whole thing. But if something sounds different it changes the movie. Music is the back drop of what you talk about.
I am a musician. My passion for music has obliterated everything in its path for my entire life. Whenever there was a choice between music and anything else, music won hands down every time. No one person or material thing could ever come close to the feeling I get when the music is right.
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