Words about music (854): Nick Lowe

The world is full of musicians who can play great, and you wouldn't cross the road to see them. It's people who have this indefinable attitude that are the good ones.

Nick Lowe

Words about music (853): Bill Evans

Music should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise. It's easy to rediscover part of yourself, but through art you can be shown part of yourself you never knew existed. That's the real mission of art. The artist has to find something within himself that's universal and which he can put into terms that are communicable to other people. The magic of it is that art can communicate to a person without his realizing it... enrichment, that's the function of music.

Bill Evans

Words about music (852): Louis Armstrong

Music is life itself. What would this world be without good music? No matter what kind it is.

Louis Armstrong

Words about music (851): Kris Kristofferson

I always had to wait until something hit me, and I could write it. But when I would cut an album, to me it represented the time that I spent since the last one. Just the way I was looking at the world.

Kris Kristofferson

Words about music (850): Willie Nelson

When you're singing, you're using extra muscles, and it requires a lot of exercise and breathing. You can't do that if you're a sissy. If I have any fitness advice for people, I'd tell them to sing more. It's good therapy, too.

Willie Nelson

Words about music (849): Otis Redding

If you want to be a singer, you've got to concentrate on it twenty-four hours a day. You can't be a well driller, too. You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.

Otis Redding

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