A Quote by Rivers Cuomo

I always like balance. If I'm playing rock music all the time, chances are I'll start craving some lighter, poppier stuff, both to listen to and to play. I compare music to massage. If someone's been working on your back for a long time, you really want them to move down to your legs or something.
And if you look around, if you listen to some music nowdays, I'm not so optimistic...I have the feeling that some of the young people I've met they think already, before they start playing, they think already about the product: how can we sell it....maybe my view is really very old fashioned nowadays, but I think art at any times needs time for development and this fast food bullshit is not working... younger guys: take your time, music is really a thing of long terms, actually it's a lifelong thing to learn and to develop your own stuff.
I think if there's ever been a time we need music more, it's now. For our kids, it teaches you to take time, to listen, to work together, to listen to other people, and to use your brain. That's why classical music doesn't work when you throw it at people in a subway platform while they're rushing to work. Classical music is something that needs to be contemplated, you have to be completely present with an active mind that's working. It's not background music.
I like to listen to mellow stuff on the road like Travis, as we are constantly surrounded by rock music on tour and so its nice listening to mellow stuff. Obviously back at home I listen to a lot more rock music.
Music is life. Music defines peoples' experience on this planet. Name one time in your life that wasn't punctuated by the music you listened to at the time. When people are down, they listen to music that commiserates that emotion. When people are amped up, they listen to more upbeat, loud songs.
I do like people who are popular across the years and stuff like that, but I'm not a big pop music fan. I don't listen to the radio unless it's KCRW, like Booka Shade. Yeah, like weird music is what I'm really into right now. But I like anything really. There's just so much. I buy new music almost every day, so there's so much coming in that I don't even have time to listen to something more that twice.
You can read books on stuff all day long, but until you get out there and just do it, if you want to start playing, and you want to make some music, then go out and play. Go find yourself a venue and play, even if it's in your home. Just play every day. You win the fight by fighting.
As an artist, I always just want to grow as a songwriter. I listen to a lot of music. I listen to music all the time, whether it's hip-hop or soul or rock or whatever. I'm always listening to music and trying to learn from other songwriters and how they tap into certain emotions and communicate more clearly.
Any time I'm trying to find that groove on a big tempo song, I go back and listen to some Aerosmith records. 'Love in an Elevator,' 'Rag Doll,' all that stuff was really great music. It's something that I still dig and go back and listen to.
Of what use is the universe? What is the practical application of a million galaxies? Yet just because it has no use, it has a use - which may sound like a paradox, but is not. What, for instance, is the use of playing music? If you play to make money, to outdo some other artist, to be a person of culture, or to improve your mind, you are not really playing - for your mind is not on the music. You don't swing. When you come to think of it, playing or listening to music is a pure luxury, an addiction, a waste of valuable time and money for nothing more than making elaborate patterns of sound.
If you listen to soul music, or R&B music, or Blues music, a lot of that came from church music and spiritual music, and music has always been a really really powerful tool that people have used to get them closer to God - whatever they define God as. And for me that's always been part of what drew me to it and keeps me coming back for more.
I have to listen to music while I'm working. Music is essential. It's at the top of the pyramid for me. I've always felt disappointed in what I've made when I held it up to the music I love. I try not to compare them now.
I've been around the music business for a long time now, and I've had a lot of chances to do movies. But I didn't really want to do any until I found stuff that started to hit me in the right place.
I spend a lot of time working and with my family, so I don't have much time around the edges to do much else. I don't really listen to a great deal of music. I love music, but since I spend a lot of time in the studio, we probably watch a movie rather than listen to albums. I get to hear stuff, but not on the grand scale.
I would go to an aunt's house, and she would let me play music, and she had 'The Last Poets' album. At that time, albums didn't have explicit stickers on them, so some of the songs had profanity on them, and I was moved by that. I would listen to those songs, to the flow, and I'd balance it back and forth with the nursery stuff I had.
I've always been a fan of instructional videos. The bass-player ones are insane. The music on them is fascinating. It's not something you hear on CDs or would really ever play in bands. You listen to it and are like, 'What is happening?' It's this blizzard of notes in weird time signatures, and they're trying to teach you that.
For a long time I was trying to be poppier and younger. I didn't want to be on public radio or do any of that stuff for older people. Then I realized that that is exactly what I listen to.
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