A Quote by Tom Petty

When I go to see people, I always kind of hope they are going to play some kind of songs I know. So you've got to know your audience. It's kind of something that is a blessing and a curse in a way. You're obligated to play some of that stuff that people know, but I don't think that's all you have to do.
An audience will let you know if a song communicates. If you see them kind of falling asleep during the song, or if they clap at the end of a song, then they're telling you something about the song. But you can have a good song that doesn't communicate. Perhaps that isn't a song that you can sing to people; perhaps that's a song that you sing to yourself. And some songs are maybe for a small audience, and some songs are for a wide audience. But the audience will let you know pretty quickly.
You know what your trouble is? You're the kind who always reads the handbook. Anything people build, any kind of technology, it's going to have some specific purpose. It's for doing something that somebody already understands. But if it's new technology, it'll open areas nobody's ever thought of before. You read the manual, man, and you won't play around with it, not the same way. And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do something you never thought of.
Some of the craziest people I know, some of the coolest guys I know who party and go crazy and play rock shows and have tons of tattoos, they will still go to church on Sunday and do their best to live that kind of a life.
If I don't have something to do, I'm not the kind of person who can sit on a beach on holiday. I've got to go and check things out and see things and look at things, and have some kind of itinerary in my mind. I think that a lot of people who are, in some ways, successful are kind of like that.
I always tell people go see something you don't know about. Something you didn't read a ton about on the internet. Something that you don't know what's going to happen because I think that kind of pleasure of finding something new and discovering it, creates a hunger in you.
It's funny to be discovered by a lot of people who didn't know you before. People always used to say, 'Do you shop at Home Depot?' or 'Does your kid go to such and such school?' They want to know why they know me, even if they don't know my name. I don't think that's a bad thing, by the way; I think it's nice to be kind of anonymously famous.
Nightmares are a strange thing. Your worst fear is sometimes something you enjoy thinking about, for some strange reason. I don't know why that is, but it's some kind of fantasy that people play out. "What would I do to protect my children? I'd do anything." And then, you watch it play out. I'm petrified of such a thing.
I think there should be some way to find some kind of reasonable accommodation that allows the state to continue to say, you know, that women's rights supersede any kind of a cultural custom that's oppressive to women, but also potentially allows a woman to take the oath, I don't know, in a separate room. It would be up to the court to find some kind of cultural accommodation.
I play some places where the people are right at my feet, and you can see their expressions. It's kind of more like playing in your living room. It's almost easier to play in front of thousands of people in an arena scene, in some ways, but you don't get the personal contact.
Creativity is about play and a kind of willingness to go with your intuition. It's crucial to an artist. If you know where you are going and what you are going to do, why do it? I think I learned that from the artists, from my grandmother, from all the creative people I've spent time with over the years.
Football players have always got a problem, some pain, and in some games, I have had small problems with my knee or some pain, and I played anyway, but people don't know if I have a problem or not. People just know if you score a goal or if you play badly, but they never know if you are well or not.
Whenever we play new material, eventually some of the songs become classics themselves. They can't become that unless you play them. Any new song is not going to go down as well as some of the old stuff, because obviously the old stuff the fans know inside out.
Phonetics, you know speech, all this kind of stuff, phonograph, simple, but when you unpack the meaning it actually kind of expands out and that is what I was going for in my book "Sound Unbound" was to try and get people to figure out how do we unpack some of the meanings that go into these kinds of sonically coded landscapes.
Many times, people have come up to me after singing some songs, and they'd say, 'Richie, do you know what you did?' And I'd say, 'What?' And they'd go, 'I wrote these songs down for you to sing, and you sang them all in a row.' But that's the kind of communication that happens, you know.
I've been doing four-track songs by myself since I was like a teenager, where I'd sing in a way that I ... I just didn't think other people would like it, so I didn't play it for them but eventually I got over that, which I'm happy that I did, because it's kind of a drag to be playing a kind of music that you don't really like as much as another kind.
I'm always writing something. I've got so much stuff, I don't know what to do with it. Some of it will be Strokes, some of it will be I don't know what - stuff for pop singers. TV themes. I've got a jar stuffed with songs, all these ideas that are just me humming into a recording device.
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