Top 1200 Irish Music Quotes & Sayings - Page 15

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

I have to listen to music while I'm working. Music is essential. It's at the top of the pyramid for me. I've always felt disappointed in what I've made when I held it up to the music I love. I try not to compare them now.

I come from Chicago and am a child of Irish Catholic parents who were able to wield guilt like a Ginsu knife.

I love being in a room in front of an audience who cares about the music, who knows the music, and who has lived with the music. It's kind of like an experience you share. I'm on stage performing it, but they're singing the words, too.

I've never personally criticized anyone else's music, but I know that the public's real problem is not the music I make but the perception that I play simple music for money only and for the notoriety and to increase my popularity.

He [Bill Clinton] likes to hearken back to his kind of Irish roots, so I think he'd love to be called First Laddy.

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.

The old Irish when immersing a babe at baptism left out the right arm so that it would remain pagan for good fighting

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.

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.

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

The majority of the members of the Irish parliament are professional politicians, in the sense that otherwise they would not be given jobs minding mice at crossroads.

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.

To anyone with a drop of Irish blood in them the land they live on is like their mother. It's the only thing that lasts, that's worth working for, for fighting for

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.

there are two kinds of music - good music and bad music. Good music is music that I want to hear. Bad music is music that I don't want to hear.

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.

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 felt that the IRA, in the context of Irish history, and Sinn Fein were a legitimate force that had to be recognized, and you wouldn't have peace without them.

I would love to play a British character one day. My accent wavers between Scottish and Irish very easily, though.

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.

I find being Irish quite a wearing thing. It takes so much work because it is a social construction. People think you are going to be this, this, and this.

I have the soul of a singer and do splendidly in the shower but the world will never hear it. Basically, I'm the only Irish person who can't carry a tune.

Concurring hands divide flax for damask that when bleached by Irish weather has the silvered chamois-leather water-tightness of a skin.

I'm crazy about Dublin. If you went back 3,000 years in my ancestry you wouldn't find a drop of Irish blood in the veins, but I love the place.

When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.

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

Music expresses feeling, that is to say, gives shape and habitation to feeling, not in space but in time. To the extent that music has a history that is more than a history of its formal evolution, our feelings must have a history too. Perhaps certain qualities of feeling that found expression in music can be recorded by being notated on paper, have become so remote that we can no longer inhabit them as feelings, can get a grasp of them only after long training in the history and philosophy of music, the philosophical history of music, the history of music as a history of the feeling soul.

Hats are the epitome of Englishness, and a royal wedding is the penultimate moment for a hat designer. I'm Irish, but I am a royalist and I believe in fantasy.

Los Angeles is not going to be a big naive step for me. I know it's tough out there, but I do think there's a place for Irish actors in that market.

Big band music, to me, it really has three key elements. First is the lyrics are really sweet, and they're just really family-friendly. The second thing is the music is jazz music, so the music is complicated enough to hold your attention for 5 or 6 million plays. That makes the songs interesting. The last part is the fact that it's danceable.

You don't make this kind of music expecting to have to do TV press and stuff like that. I don't mind doing it, but it's a fairly underground type of music. You do it for the love of the music more than being a star or anything.

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

I'm glad people think I'm a badass. I'm a rock and roller, and I'm an R&B and a blueswoman. I don't do fairy music, although I love Celtic music and sensitive music. There's a balance between ballads and kick-ass songs.

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 had grown up as an Irish poet in a country where the distance between vision and imagination was not quite as wide as in some other countries.

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.

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.

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.

Any nobody from the folk blues world could avoid being influenced by Woody Guthrie, who is actually of Scottish-Irish ancestry.

But if republicans are to prevail, if the peace process is to be successfully concluded and Irish sovereignty and re-unification secured, then we have to set the agenda - no-one else is going to do that.

There's still a great hesitancy in the Irish make up about expressing feelings... it'd be nice to say I miss you, I love you, come home.

London's been really good to me - England as a whole - but the Scots and the Irish especially are very appreciative because that's kind of where it all came from.

There is an Irish way of paying compliments as though they were irresistible truths which makes what would otherwise be an impertinence delightful.

I've got the fighting Irish, and Puerto Ricans are some of the best fighters in the world. I'm proud of who I am, but it doesn't define me as a person.

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.

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?

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.

Consider Ireland.... You have a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church, and in addition the weakest executive in the world. That is the Irish Question.

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.

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

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.

'Wii Music' elevates the scope of music video games by moving beyond commentary on what music is - as 'Rock Band' and 'Guitar Hero' do - to suggesting what it could be. Yet I'm still left wondering: Couldn't it be more?

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.

Poets, I think, are born. You can't teach it. It's genetic - the circumstances of how you were raised... and there's probably some Irish in your blood lines.

the Irish ... are full of the fear of the Lord and the joy of living, and they don't know how to combine the two, but they'll sure have a good time trying.

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.

The Band is probably the ultimate example of people taking all kinds of music, from gospel to blues to mountain music to folk music to on and on and on and on and putting them all in this big pot and mixing up a new gumbo.

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.