Words about music (848): Philip Glass

What came to me as a revelation was the use of rhythm in developing an overall structure in music.

Philip Glass

Words about music (847): Glenn Branca

Music is about imagination. It's about thought. It's about creating something from nothing.

Glenn Branca

Words about music (845): Steven Wilson

photo: Joel del Tufo

If you want to be an entertainer and just keep your audience happy, that's one thing. But to be an artist, I think, means ultimately primarily pleasing yourself, and in that respect, you constantly have this sense of confronting the expectations of your audience.

Steven Wilson

Words about music (844): Fee Waybill

Songwriting, for me, that's the way it works. We were just talking about going to see the Elton John movie, Rocketman, the other day - my wife and I - and Bernie Taupin and Elton John are the only writing duo that I had ever heard of that did it backwards, where Bernie would write the lyrics, hand them to Elton, and say, "Put music to this." I never did it that way. I guess it doesn't matter the way you do it, as long as you get the song done.

Fee Waybill

Words about music (843): Paul Weller

The only time I ever really got into rap was back in the early '90s, and bands like A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Gang Starr. Musically, they were really interesting. But when hip-hop acts start sampling Sting or Phil Collins, then I just don't get it at all.

Paul Weller

Words about music (842): Siouxsie Sioux

Gothic in its purest sense is actually a very powerful, twisted genre, but the way it was being used by by journalists - 'goff' with a double f - always seemed to me to be about tacky, harum-scarum horror, and I find that anything but scary. That wasn't what we were about at all.

Siouxsie Sioux

Words about music (841): Kevin Ayers

Soft Machine were going more in the direction of fusion jazz and I didn't like that. They were going more in the direction of jazz, which didn't interest me. I was strictly pop. They were into what I consider really to be incredibly self-indulgent music. It's stuff you play for yourself, and "fuck the audience.

Kevin Ayers

Words about music (840): Alanis Morissette

I'll be writing records until I'm dead, whether people like it or not! I can't not write; if I don't, then I get really depressed. I'll keep going, I promise!

Alanis Morissette

Words about music (839): Stephen Fry

Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set on its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dog's bollocks. Nothing else comes close.

Stephen Fry

Words about music (838): Syd Barrett

It's always been too slow for me. Playing. The pace of things. I'm a fast sprinter. The trouble was, after playing in the group for a few months, I couldn't reach that point.

Syd Barrett

Words about music (837): David Gilmour

I just play intuitively and work the same way in the studio. I don't have any magical effects or anything that helps me to get my particular sound.

David Gilmour

Words about music (836): Nick Mason

I've always liked a very dry snare and, like everyone else, a very dry bass drum.

Nick Mason

Words about music (835): Rick Wright

It's a mistake thinking that drugs supplied Pink Floyd with the inspiration. The ones who took drugs were the ones who came to see the shows.

Rick Wright

Words about music (834): Tina Weymouth

Make it, not make it? What's the difference? Music is a language, it's a dance of life, and it can be a part of your life without being something that earns.

Tina Weymouth

Words about music (833): Chet Baker

It seems to me that most people are impressed with just three things: how fast you can play, how high you can play, and how loud you can play.

Chet Baker

Words about music (832): Kim Gordon

I picked up the bass kind of postpunk-style. There's a real art to not learning how to play an instrument and being able to still play it.

Kim Gordon

Words about music (831): Joe Satriani

Life is a mixture of happiness and suffering. So, when you’re a musician or any artist for that matter, it’s difficult because it’s not a job, it’s a 24-hour a day neurosis of sort. Like when you lock your desk up or drive home from a gig or leave your job and you can just forget about everything; it’s very awful when you show up to do your job when you’re a musician, but there’s no creativity there – so you just wait. There’s that thing about you that drives you to be a player – it’s with you 24 hours a day. It’s always there. There is no holiday, no summer vacation, nothing. It is all consuming.

Joe Satriani

Words about music (830): Jan Akkerman

I used to listen to a lot of Frank Zappa and really liked his eclectic approach to making music, but the main heavy rock guitar motif that is throughout the track is actually very Chuck Berry based.

Jan Akkerman

Words about music (829): Ronnie Wood

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

Ronnie Wood

Words about music (829): Jeff Beck

When you get guys coming up to you in clubs or restaurants or somewhere, and they say how much they've enjoyed your playing on records, then that pays off dividends every day; every time they say it, you think, 'I'm glad I did that.'

Jeff Beck