Top 28 Busking Quotes & Sayings

In Irish law, busking is considered vagrancy - you can be arrested for it. It's risky asking people for money in public. So it's not like it's a high-art job. And people who do it as a high-art job make very little money.

I've done my share of busking, and it's fun until it isn't. There are musicians in the subways that will make you cry, they're so good.

Well, everything about singing, I learned from busking. Everything I learned about songwriting, I learned from busking.

It's cliche, but everybody says, 'We're all one song away,' and it's so true. The difference between me and the guy down the street busking with his guitar case open is just one song.

I felt like I was homeless anyway, so the change in environment wasn't that much of a big deal. I felt pretty much the same. After six months of living on the streets [in Camden], I started singing, busking.

I was very lucky. Things happened, both bad and good, but I never got into real, deep trouble. But it wore me down. By the time I was 18, I was done. I didn't want to live the life any more. I needed to develop past the point that busking takes you to.

The first album was more born from busking - they were the 'me-and-my-guitar' songs. Going out on the road and opening for big acts changes you. You look out at those audiences and start to think, 'OK, I need to write some music that's a little bit bigger.'

Busking is the essence of what I do. It's made everything possible.

I worked in a supermarket for a year; I worked in a finance department at a university, a pub, busking and singing. I tried to be a nanny for about three weeks.

Passyunk Productions is our film & tv production company. The name comes from a street in Philly, Passyunk Avenue, where the concept of The Roots was born, as Ahmir and I started out busking on the corner of 5th & Passyunk back in the early '90s.

I did pretty well busking. I would play two to eight hours a day, and I could make two or three hundred an hour.

Without busking, there is no Fantastic Negrito.

I chose busking because I didn't want to be working for someone else. I wanted to work as I am. I feel like you ultimately do have a choice if you have your vision. So, I had a vision forever that I was going to play music. And there was no stopping that.

Well, the first Australian tour I literally just took busking to the stage.

I thought the world of live performance and busking was where I was going to thrive. I had no idea that digital streaming platforms and radio and that world would be for me, you know?

My mum pushed me to get a normal job when I finished school, and I just wasn't into that at all. So I hit the street and started busking and making my own way.

'Vagabond' is about owning where I come from, understanding the real power music had to transport myself with, whether that's busking in Europe or getting number ones.

I've played in some pretty weird settings; busking puts you in all kinds of situations. I can tell you the most depressing gig I've played was in the North of England. At that time, I was playing with a band. We drove 7 or 8 hours to Carlisle to play a 600 - 700 capacity venue - 9 people showed up.

When I was busking, when I was paying for petrol with silver coins or when I was sneaking into hostels so I could park my van up and sleep in it, I had the best time of my life.

Everything about singing, I learned from busking. Everything I learned about songwriting, I learned from busking. Busking, you learn people, you learn about reading people. You learn about reading the atmosphere of the street. If you stand still in any city long enough, you see everyone pass you by. It's almost like you get to know personality types, just by watching people walk past. You get a sense for things.

I worked in retail for a bit and then I busked for two years. As soon as I started, I thought, 'I'll do busking until I'm 50 because this is the best job in the world.'

I started busking when I was 24. I was living with Mom and Dad. I'd broken up with my girlfriend and didn't know what I was doing with my life, and I thought, 'Well, this is the last shot - I'm going busking, and let's see what happens.'

To be honest, busking was a massive part of becoming aware of homelessness. I used to run into a lot of 'Big Issue' sellers and a lot of people on the street. It really opened my eyes to the kind of life that they live and the options that are open for them - or not, actually.

If you get the chance to be a Bourke Street busker, you actually have to do an audition in front of a council panel. You get a roster every week that has your busking shifts on it - I'm serious: it's an actual job.

Busking taught me so much on so many levels, not just about being a musician or writing songs - actually about growing up and being a human!

Patti [ Scialfa] was an artist and a musician and she was a songwriter. And she was a lot like me in that she was transient also. She worked busking on the streets in New York. She waitressed. She had - she just lived a life - she lived a musician's life. She lived an artist's life. So we were both people who were very uncomfortable in a domestic setting, getting together and trying to build one and seeing if our particularly strange jigsaw puzzle pieces were going to fit together in a way that was going to create something different for the two of us. And it did.

Dance Monkey' is about the bad side of busking.

There was a lot of times when I was busking there were a lot of people in your face, like 'More, more! Go again, again, again!'... People were so used to be able to swipe to see something different to entertain themselves that the patience had diminished.