A Quote by Tom Verlaine

I write a lot of more instrumental music than I do vocal music. It's because I come out of a background of playing piano and then playing sax for a number of years. I kind of got into rock backwards. A lot of guys go into rock and then get sick of it and then go into something else. I came the other way, so I've always just had a lot more stuff lying around.
A lot of people ask how I ended up doing classical music given that I'm in a rock band. The truth is that it's the other way around. I was trained as a classical musician and then started playing in a rock band later.
I feel like I have a lot of rhythm because I'm from the DMV. Because you got so many different types of music: Baltimore Club music, Go-Go, then you got the DMV rap music scene, then you got the DMV R&B music scene. It's a lot of music and it's a lot of taste that caters to most.
For a couple of years, I'd work from 6 to 11 P.M., then 1 to 5 A.M., and then got up and tried to go to school. That was pretty rough, but I got a lot of experience playing music.
The music I used to make was a lot more rock, so I come from this background of head banging a lot, and it took me a while to figure out how to do it in the context of our music.
I know a lot of bands that will make their first record and get to a certain level, and then when the second record comes out, they can start where they left off as a headlining act playing in front of a certain number of people, or they can go back out and make a lot less money and open for people. I feel like if you go out and just go right back into that headlining stuff, you're playing to the converted.
A lot of Utah State when I was there, there was a lot of California guys. So, you get a lot of Cali music, you got a lot of dance music, I think the Jerk was popular back then. It was a lot of the music that you can dance to with your teammates. A lot of hip-hop, rap, R&B, it was really fun. It was live in there.
When I was nine years old, I started playing guitar, and I took classical guitar lessons and studied music theory. And played jazz for a while. And then when I was around fourteen years old, I discovered punk rock. And so I then tried to unlearn everything I had learned in classical music and jazz so I could play in punk rock bands.
It's just rock and roll. A lot of times we get criticized for it. A lot of music papers come out with: 'When are they going to stop playing these three chords?' If you believe you shouldn't play just three chords it's pretty silly on their part. To us, the simpler a song is, the better, 'cause it's more in line with what the person on the street is.
I was interested in a whole range of music that I used to play, popular music -- particularly American music -- that I heard a lot of when I was a teenager," "I think at a certain point it dawned on me that myself playing this music wasn't very convincing. It was more convincing when we played music that came from our own stock of tradition. ... I certainly feel a lot more comfortable playing so-called Celtic music.
I really do listen to all types of music, not only rock, but everything from good pop music - which is usually older pop music - to R&B and indie rock. I love indie rock more than a lot of the commercial stuff that you'd expect.
I really do listen to all types of music, not only rock, but everything from good pop music - which is usually older pop music - to RB and indie rock. I love indie rock more than a lot of the commercial stuff that you'd expect.
I don't think it's changed that much when you go on the principle if Garth introduced more rock into country music, then Florida Georgia Line's gonna introduce more dance and more beat-driven stuff into country music. That's just how it's gonna go. So whatever influences you as a kid, you're gonna put in your music.
In my career, there've been three stages really. There's been the stage when you come into a team, you don't feel the nerves, you just go out and play. Then through your 20s you start thinking a lot more about the games and what's at stake. And then, as you get more experienced towards the end of your career, you enjoy it a lot more and you're a lot more relaxed.
I'm sort of old-fashioned in the sense that I like to write something that I feel I could just perform alone, obviously, because I do that a lot in concert. So I try to make a song where there is as much that is as distinct as I can get it, just if I'm playing it or if I'm singing it. That makes me really do a lot of stuff in the guitar work when I sit and try to figure out how to indicate what sort of dynamic I'm aiming for. Where, rhythmically, I want to go. That's sort of what ties a lot of different records together, is that it's usually always based around me singing and playing a guitar.
We went through rock 'n' roll, which then became just rock, then punk rock, then the worst disease of all - rap music. It's an oxymoron, because rap is not music.
I listened to a lot of reggae music, a lot of Caribbean, a lot of gospel, a lot of rock, a lot of country, hip-hop... you know, so it just gave me perspective when it came to music and what I liked.
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