A Quote by Rory Gallagher

Playing live is much more natural for me. The instant reaction and the feedback from the audience is great for me. I really relish it. And if you play blues-based music, it's not really academic music or recital music. It really needs a bit of atmosphere and a bit of interplay and a bit of roughness, and you really get that with an audience.
With lyrics for me, it's usually musically-based. It's not really poetry- or writer-based. It's rock-based. It doesn't mean that I'm aping rock lyrics, but I'm writing from a music standpoint. I'm thinking more of music heroes, if they're in my mind. Not William Blake or John Ashbury. Sometimes maybe I thought of him a little bit. Or Wallace Stevens. I don't even really fully understand either of them.
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.
When I first came on the scene, I don't think people knew what to make of the way I dress, my aesthetic and how that ties into my music. It took a lot of explaining. You don't really see females in country music dressed in all black wearing funeral garb with netting on their face. I have a bit of a gothic sense to me in a lot of ways, with a bit of outlaw country, rockabilly and blues. My subject matter is off the cuff a little bit.
I think I'm really part of a whole generational movement in a way. I think a lot of other people since and during this time have gotten interested in writing what we can still call experimental music. It's not commercial music. And it's really a concert music, but a concert music for our time. And wanting to find the audience, because we've discovered the audience is really there. Those became really clear with Einstein on the Beach.
Genre is a really great shorthand you can have with an audience. In the same way you can use music to create a connection with an audience, it brings so much of their knowledge of what genre really is to the table. You have a shortcut to connect with them. I really like that.
When you look at so much of what we all love, there's either soul-based to it, or it's the blues. It's really the beginnings of any kind of music. It really is; it all starts there. Because after that, it's music of the moment.
I really don't. I have truly eclectic taste in music and I seem to cycle through phases in terms of to what's inspiring me. I'll go from Beethoven to Sigur Ros; World Music, Brit-pop, Classic Rock, Blues/Jazz, even the odd bit of Heavy metal.
When you're playing rock music to 10,000 people, you almost attack the audience. When you play acoustic you're waiting for the audience to respond. It's a reverse energy, and you're more vulnerable. It's really intense.
There's a part of me that is really, really happy with all of my success lately because of what it can get me and what it can buy me in the fact that my music will hopefully reach more people. But it also makes me a little bit miserable because the minute the spotlight is on you, people start flinging sh*t at you for whatever reason.
The media circus got a bit twisted when I was in London. It became a bit of a joke, really. In Paris, they're so serious, I can take myself really seriously, too. I can get really morbid without people telling me to cheer up.
My period as a young teenager when you really listen to music so you can get understand a little bit more about what the music is was, say, 1965 to 1968. I was just lucky to be in those times.
We’re really lucky to live in a planet that has so much music. We could be living in some bland planet that had no music, no movies, no books, just a bunch of people going around having jobs and things like that. To me that would be a really miserable place, you know, to me music is what makes this world a really fun place to be, you know?
When I was playing piano, it was like, 'I'm going to write a song using all the white keys.' My music director, who knew my jazz background, suggested I try big-band music, so we spent a year experimenting with it in concert, and the audience reaction was really good.
I would say I was a little bit outgoing, a little bit shy. I was definitely much more shy than my brother. I was young - age six. I was really drawn to music because my brother started playing instruments and I wanted to be at his level, even though I was younger.
I think the Control has really opened up the music to a whole new audience. I've met kids recently, kids of people I know who are 14 and 17 who love Joy Division and have been a fan before the movie, which is really weird. How does that happen? I have no idea. But, the music that's out there today is heavily influenced by these bands from the 70s and 80s like Joy Division. I want them to take away a little bit of what Ian Curtis was and, at such a young age, he had so much going on.
I'm a huge fan of a lot of different genres of music, and I really felt like somehow I had been pigeonholed a little bit - maybe of my own doing - and in a way where I felt like I was sort of falsely defined. What my music was being called wasn't really the music I was always listening to.
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