Top 1200 Blues Music Quotes & Sayings - Page 20

The blues is a mighty long road. Or it could be a river, one that twists and turns and flows into a sea of limitless musical potential.

An eighty-nine year old kid from Boston playing a blues in New Orleans takes a lot of chutzpah.

I think music is just a wonderful ingredient that helps us understand a scene better. And certainly you can overuse music, and you can use the wrong music. I probably have been guilty of these things over time. But if you use music correctly as a friend of the theme, a friend of the narrative, ou can lend some terrific connective tissue to a film.

I put a limited time on the blues. I say, 'I allowed myself to be blue for four hours, and now I'm going to stop.'

Play the pentatonic blues scale, just for fret- and pick-hand dexterity and to mesh them both together.

Composers don't just sit in a room and write things that are in their heads, they actually listen to a lot of music, pop music, jazz, rock and roll, any combination of music that catches their ear.

I came from a family where my people didn't like rhythm and blues. Bing Crosby - "Pennies from Heaven" - Ella Fitzgerald, was all I heard.

Music was our food... When we can play, it can't be so terrible. The music, the music!

I'm from Kenner, Louisiana, where music is played for every occasion in life. There's music for being born, there's music for dying... It's just natural. Families get really good because they play a lot together.

Performance and music are inexorably tied together. And hell, I'll watch Brittany's Toxic music video all day. But there's a difference between that and listening to Leo Kottke play guitar. One is entertainment. The other is Music.

I think it was that we were really seasoned musicians. We had serious roots that spanned different cultures, obviously the blues.

There are two kinds of music; German music and bad music.

I think there's a difference between the type of folk music that people put into the box of "folk music" and then there's the kind of folk music that I aspire to and am in awe of, and that is the kind of folk music where it's very limited tools - in most cases a guitar, in a self-taught style that is idiosyncratic and particular to that musician.

I think we're returning to more of the original vibration of music and creativity through the removal of this distortion called the music industry. That's where we're heading. And it'll cut out a lot of music if people ever expected to make money.

In the U.K., classical music is composed by individuals and written down. Indian music is based on certain sequences called ragas. When I perform live, 95% of the music is improvised: it never sounds the same twice.

There is a certain frame of mind to which a cemetery is, if not an antidote, at least an alleviation. If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else.

Music is really everything I know. To be honest every experience I've ever had has been brought up from music and everything I do is because of music. I don't know anything else, I think about music before I go to sleep and it just really is everything that I am.

I guess hip-hop has been closer to the pulse of the streets than any music we've had in a long time. It's sociology as well as music, which is in keeping with the tradition of black music in America.

I'm not sure I ever try to make a case for the music. I mean, sometimes the music isn't even that good. I just tell the band's stories; if I describe the music, it's to explain how it moved the overall story along.

Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.

Everybody thinks I'm, like, a bad boy. I've had my day, but I just sit at home and play the blues mostly.

Banjos are used in Celtic, English folk music and obviously American music. But not that much in pop music. But it's more versatile than people realise it to be. It's a beautiful instrument, very rhythmic and melodic. You can do anything with it.

Without music you are all dead; with music you are alive. There is nothing music can't do.

Everyone in my family, they do music, and they love music; it's all about the music.

There are two genres of music: there's good music and there's bad music.

It's funny how the music industry is enraged about the Internet and the way things are copied without being paid for. But you know why people steal the music? Because they can't afford the music.

I listen to lots of blues records and some of them are funny. BB King's 'How Blue Can You Get' is hilarious.

It is necessary to introduce light vibrations, represented by reds and yellows, and a sufficient amount of blues, to obtain an airy feeling.

I play music - I write my own music, but I play music, just background music really, and just let it happen.

Christian music, gospel music, sometimes you'll fall asleep at church but music wakes you up, the song can speak to you in a way that's puts a fire in you. So if I'm working with a mainstream artist I'm trying to find a bigger purpose.

Some people tell me that the worried blues ain't bad. Worst old feelin' I most ever had.

"Subterranean Homesick Blues" [of Bob Dylan] captures, in word-salad format, life in an encroaching police state.

The show is coming from the music. I get on the stage with the band, and I communicate with my musicians, and the music that we create and all that is coming out of us. The music is making the show and the music is creating the atmosphere, so if you close your eyes and listen and feel what it is that's coming out of the speakers, that's the whole point.

You know Bakersfield was full of workers from the south, from Texas and Arkansas, and they brought their gospel and blues with them. And that's the sound I grew with.

As you grow older, you learn to appreciate all the artistry. I'm actually on my way back to the blues, you know, that my mothers and fathers liked.

What I decided was I'd be happier not being in the confines of a corporate infrastructure producing music. That's when I was free, and it opened up the door to have a different personality and incarnations. That's really when I had success in my music life. I was able to license my music.

My form of rebellion was starting to play guitar. I was 13. The first song I played was 'Lovesick Blues' by Hank Williams.

When you're 12 and, you know, slightly overweight and - for lack of a better word - white, and you're playing blues, you get a lot of press.

For me, personally, the most interesting music comes from the popular sector - from film and pop music - since contemporary classical music got stuck and went into directions where it lost a lot of the public by over-intellectualizing.

I remember my brother came home with a bass and played a blues solo on it. I just went insane for days afterwards learning that.

In most of my films I write the music into the script. I'm listening to songs and lyrics that empower the themes of the film. There's a lot of Indigenous music that has not been heard widely and I love the idea of giving that music to the rest of the world.

I'm a fan of music, some rock music. But I like many types of music. But I suppose a kind of longstanding love of specific bands would be Radiohead, Wilco, Neil Young, Tom Waits, REM.

Being in the music business requires having a very strong resolve. You must be completely committed to the craziness that will inevitably ensue when pursing a career in music. There is no one who is immune to this. Not even the biggest music icons.

I'd rather call it "instrumental creative music," especially the music that I've been doing. If a person would hear that music, they would undoubtedly call it "jazz." There is this whole generation of musicians that are playing and thinking critically for themselves and making music that's relevant to today. I hope that's the objective of a lot of musicians.

When someone is themselves through their music, it's soul music. James Taylor is soul music to me 'cause it's just him talking about him. It doesn't have anything to do with black or growing up in the church; it's where it comes from. It's just soul music.

My influences are with Irish music, church music and classical music.

What did we play in the Harry Dean Stanton Band? It was old blues and country - all covers. I never wrote anything.

I was very engaged by the folk music movement.Bob Dylan; Joan Baez; Peter, Paul and Mary. And then I sort of discovered world music, and fell in love with ethnic music of all sorts.

Music to me was never something that I could listen to while reading a book. Especially when I was studying music, if I was going to listen to music, I was going to put on the headphones or crank the stereo, and by God, I was going to sit there and just listen to music. I wasn't going to talk on the phone and multitask, which I can't do anyway.

I think that cheap music often does make you dream more than more serious music, whether that's serious music by Beethoven or Miles Davis or Pink Floyd... if the Floyd ever did serious music, which I seriously doubt.

The music that I make isn't really like any of the music that I listen to. I think I listen to cool music, but I know that I don't make cool music - so it's kind of funny!

So what's happening with the audio/visuality, for the first time we are doing the music - the people who would come to the concert love the music - they loved him and loved his music - for the first time in concert it's not only the music. Now it's time to know the man. We know the music, but what was the man like?

Soul and blues were a definite influence on me. It was raw and naked emotion which you didn't get much where I come from.

When I was sixteen, I wrote the first hundred or so pages of a novel about a piano that was haunted by the ghost of an evil blues musician.

For me, let's keep jazz as folk music. Let's not make jazz classical music. Let's keep it as street music, as people's everyday-life music. Let's see jazz musicians continue to use the materials, the tools, the spirit of the actual time that they're living in, as what they build their lives as musicians around.

When I travel too much, it affects the music, and that is the most important thing. As long as I make good music, I can play shows, but if the music starts getting bad, the show offers won't come.

I think rap music has made more money on dance music than dance music has made on dance music. Just a thought.

Every work is completely different. Sometimes the music is first, sometimes it's parallel, and sometimes the music is after. There's no rule. Music goes differently to your emotions. With music you can create different spaces and feelings easier than you can with the visual - maybe not easier, but in a way, it's more seductive.

Man, don't get me started on Pat Travers. That dude writes killer blues rock and roll riffs.

It's this funny thing now: You sign up to be a musician because you want to write music, but you don't spend your time writing music. Instead, you go around the world selling the music you've already made.