Musician Quotes

I really wanted a guitar. As A little boy I used to tell people I was going to be a musician. They would humor me, and I'd make up thirty minute songs and drive them nuts.

It's amazing to hear proficient musicians play your music. It's a once in a lifetime kind of experience.

People don't run out of dreams - people just run out of time.

The only reward the musician receives is music: the privilege of standing in the presence of music when it leans over and takes us into its confidence. As it is for the audience. In this moment everything else is irrelevant and without power. For those in music, this is the moment when life becomes real.

I know that I'm capable of moving around on the guitar. I can express myself the way I want to and feel good about it. But as far as technical chops, I'm not a learned musician.

Growing up with my dad being a musician, it seemed like a male centric world to me. I just didn't know many girls playing guitar.

You don't find geniuses in street musicians, but that doesn't mean to say you can't be really good.

You may not be her first, her last, or her only. She loved before she may love again. But if she loves you now, what else matters?

Jazz is the greatest American art form and our greatest export. We don't pay attention to the youth of jazz, don't stoke the fires creatively for the youth coming up. I feel like jazz musicians became too much of purists - with Donald Byrd doing funk jazz in the '70s.

So far I've been very, very fortunate because it appears that people like to hear the music I like to play. What more fortunate position can a musician be in?

I am not an evangelist. I am not a preacher. I am a musician. That is what I know how to do. I know how to write songs. I know how to write things that relate to my heart. I feel that I talk about God in every song, in everything I do - all of it! I really do not know how to respond. I do not relate to that.

Musicians in my day had nicknames. My name was "Satchel Mouth," like a doctor's satchel. When I went to England this fellow was strictly English, and he was editor of the newspaper there. He shook my hand after I got off the train and said, "Hello, Satchmo." So right away my trombone player said, "Mmm, the man thinks you have mo' mouth than Satchel Mouth." So I was stuck with it, and it turned out all right.

Im just lucky to have great parents. My sisters an actress. My brothers a musician. I found it hard growing up in such a... creatively driven family. I wanted to have this thing to create, myself.

Writing is an art like other arts. Dancers don't dance every once in a while. Musicians don't stop practicing. They are dedicated to what they do.

I'm in a very good place now because I do theater, I do TV and I make movies. I was a dancer, so I dance a little bit. I was a musician, so I do a little bit of music. And I do all of this in four or five different languages, and all over the world.

There's zero correlation between owning music and being a greater music lover or musician than the next person.

I want to be connecting with the subconscious, if I can call it that, because there are not to many words to describe the real deep inner part of a human beingI want to be at that place where everything is blotted out and where creativity happens, and to get there I practice, you know I'm a prolific practicer, I still practice every dayYou have to have the skills, then you want to not think when you're playing, that's when you let whatever deep level of creativity, spirituality, I mean, you know these words are so inadequate these days but you want to get to this place where they exist.

Maybe not as an idol, but I have influenced some people, including my son Joshua. So that feels good. Wherever I play musicians come to meet me, that is a great compliment to me. I am honored.

I was able to go over [Saxophone Competition] and work a little more in Europe. I'm thankful that those of kinds of things. Simultaneously, some nice things did come in. I got a nice festival that came in, in Virginia through that. There was a club that opened in DC in the famous Willard Hotel near the White House. And the club was called The Nest. I played there a few nights. Some musicians in Philly and D.C. kind of brought me down and got me on a couple things. So things opened up a little bit.

When you go to work, if your name is on the building, you're rich. If your name is on your desk, you're middle class. And if your name is on your shirt, you're poor.

That was a very natural process because as I was creating the animatic I added music clips as reference of the kind of music I wanted in the film. These were from musicians like Naná Vasconcelos and Barbatuques, the body percussion group.

I go to a very visual place when I'm singing. It's very cinematic and I get this feeling of space. I love when music does that.

Love isn't love until you give it away.

In the end, worship can never be a performance, something you're pretending or putting on. It's got to be an overflow of your heart...Worship is about getting personal with God, drawing close to God.

One thing I always found hard to stomach over the past few years is that being a DJ or musician is a career opportunity.

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.

If our hearts and minds are not properly transformed, we are like musicians playing untuned instruments, or engineers working with broken and ill-programmed computers. The attunement of the heart is essential to the outflow of grace...We must aim at building the structures of God's kingdom but recognized that we will only create these through the transformation of our experience. Concentration on reformation without revival leads to skins without wine; concentration on revival without reformation soon loses the wine for want of skins.

Give me the artist who breathes it like a native, and goes about his work in it as quietly as a common man goes about his ordinary business. Mozart did so; and that is why I like him. Even if I did not, I should pretend to; for a taste in his music is a mark of caste among musicians, and should be worn, like a tall hat, by the amateur who wishes to pass for a true Brahmin.

It was actually the production group that ended up producing the show for us...Every musician, especially in the hip-hop community, you always make these show recaps or vlogs, and essentially what "Touring's Boring" was is, we tried to make our vlogs interesting and almost more like a TV show. That's how we got discovered by TV.

If you look at the history of popular music, the most successful musicians have started out being really marginal and esoteric. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Madonna. Prince. Bruce Springsteen. Fleetwood Mac. David Bowie. Public Enemy. Nirvana.

Paul McCartney is a genius ... Paul married Rock & Roll to beauty, and forever raised the bar for composers, musicians, and fans ... an incredible solo performer ... the creator of our favorite songs.

I'm a musician - I'm always making music. Kobe Bryant is always playing ball. Well, Snoop Dogg is always recording.

I know not everyone is a musician, but it's important to find that craft and put all of your energy into that. It's about leaving the bad vibes and going to where the good vibes are.

Live with your memories and keep them as memories and that’s great. Forget the bad times just remember the good ones and you know and hope tomorrow is a good day

I think a lot of actors, especially actors with a theater background, have a musical ear. A lot of actors just want to be musicians anyway, and a lot of musicians want to be actors.

I was a musician who began playing with computers, to see if they could make some tasks simpler. I developed some "tricks" or strategies for working with audio files, and then discovered that the same tricks could be applied to video files, or really, any type of data. Previously I made many different kinds of music. I did some work as a composer of film scores. In that role, my task was to create audio to match and deepen the visual. In my work now, the role is often reversed: I have to create images to match and deepen the audio.

I am a musician who stopped working with music. Now I work with visual music, or audio-visual music.

Yes, for me audio-visual performance has its roots in my experience working as an improvising musician and composer.

And there are people that will stand in your corner and convince you to stand up for another round no matter what.

They didn't understand it, but like so many unfortunate events in life, just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so.

God makes something special and unique about each person that sets them apart from every other person, and to me that's is what artistry is about, whether you are a plumber, a pinter, a musician whatever it is that is unique about you that is translated into your art.

I think it's time to travel, start gathering some real right-in-there experiences with street musicians around the world.

In my imaginary utopian world there would be a greater allegiance between music writers and musicians.

I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day.

Most musicians, regardless of what culture they come from, can get together and agree on some stuff about music. As there is going to be a common ground.

The goths are beautiful, a vast depth of subcultural, aesthetic and poetic ideas, and we would identify with that as we did back in 1979. But not the post modern distortion...the costume without the brain.

Listening closely to songs these days, there's a lot of lazy songwriting where people get away with it. I don't want to be too critical about it. But I also feel like I wanted to say something a bit different from just being a musician and singing about yourself. Ultimately, that's not really interesting to me. Even when I was a kid, I was interested in observing people and maybe making my own stories. That kind of reflects in my music.

I think every musician is different, every artist is different, and in a perfect world people would be able to pursue their own path and have the inspiration and the drive to, and the energy and dedication to take their path to its fruition. I don't really believe in formulas.

What goes around, comes around.

Religion is for people who fear hell, spirituality is for people who have been there.