Dwight Yoakam Quotes

#1. I've always been just kind of consumed by my own thoughts.

Dwight Yoakam

#2. As an artist, you have to maintain focus and eliminate the distraction of second-guessing yourself based on the opinions of others.

Dwight Yoakam

#3. Musicians exist independent of any of the marketing terms or the categorization.

Dwight Yoakam

#4. Film acting has been a very pure experience, because you have to give the purest form of yourself as an artist.

Dwight Yoakam

#5. To me, the hook of the riff is what makes a great guitar recording. It's the backbone of the whole song. When you have a strong riff, it's the rocket fuel for the track.

Dwight Yoakam

#6. Fortunately any of the songs we've recorded can be extremely fulfilling to perform depending on the variety of circumstances that surround any given show.

Dwight Yoakam

#7. Another lesson about a naive fool who came to Babylon, and found out that the pie don't taste so sweet.

Dwight Yoakam

#8. My guitars, Cadillacs, and hillbilly music Is the only thing that keeps me hanging on.

Dwight Yoakam

#9. The actual work of recording a record or making a film just requires that you consciously block the time out to do that and nothing else. That's what I do.

Dwight Yoakam

#10. Music's the one thing I try not to analyze. I don't want to destroy the magic that has always been there for me.

Dwight Yoakam

#11. When I was in junior high, a foreign-history teacher started a theater class. So I got my feet wet there and through high school, so I was very fascinated with acting as a means of expression.

Dwight Yoakam

#12. But that is a valid, continuing service that that music - which is, in some cases, 80 or 90 years old - is rendering. And proving its own timelessness.

Dwight Yoakam

#13. I can't escape being born in Pike County, Kentucky, grandson of a miner, Luther Tibbs, and his wife, Earlene, and traveling as a child up and down Route 23 between Kentucky and Columbus, Ohio, where I was raised, experiencing life via working-class people. Nor do I want to escape.

Dwight Yoakam

#14. My music is very personal. I've created it in solitude. I face a white wall and beller. I like that sound - the expression of loneliness. That's what it's all about.

Dwight Yoakam

#15. I think that we come to a greater understanding of the world we live in and ourselves through reading.

Dwight Yoakam

#16. At the end of the film Val suggests there may be a way to rejoin the living, when he says, 'Let's see if we're able to live among the living, walk among the living.'

Dwight Yoakam

#17. I hope that books don't go the way of albums and CD, large format albums, and physical product.

Dwight Yoakam

#18. It varies from song to song, although Buck Owens and I recently collaborated on writing a duet together and am looking forward with a great deal of anticipation to recording that track for the new studio album.

Dwight Yoakam

#19. However you arrive at the ability to ignore self-doubt - if you can acquire it or possess it or find it or discover it - move beyond self-doubt.

Dwight Yoakam

#20. We share something in common with the fabric of the whole universe that connects us.

Dwight Yoakam

#21. Ironically, the success I've experienced at country radio has left me ostracized from pop and other formats of radio.

Dwight Yoakam

#22. Country music originates with the colloquial, rural aspects of white America. It's really, truly, rural white America's blues.

Dwight Yoakam

#23. No compression or as little as possible - that's how you get a good recording.

Dwight Yoakam

#24. I was very fortunate in having David Fincher, the director come to me. Now I've seen the finished product, I feel that every bit of the nine months we spent on the film was worth it.

Dwight Yoakam

#25. My parents were not affluent people and were not - didn't come from the extremities of education. My mother had a high school diploma. I often think I so wish she'd come out of the hills in Appalachia and been able to go on to college. I think she would have made a wonderful teacher.

Dwight Yoakam

#26. I say love,
it knows no season.
It haunts the soul
eternally.

Dwight Yoakam

#27. Quality is timeless: It will clearly define itself. And so I make reference to and acknowledge things that I feel have been dismissed, trying to restate those musical and cultural elements clearly and vehemently.

Dwight Yoakam

#28. I live out of cans a lot. But I try to indulge only in healthy canned food.

Dwight Yoakam

#29. The future has a lot to do with the past.

Dwight Yoakam

#30. I embrace country music because of love, a love of what I came from.

Dwight Yoakam

#31. Control success before it controls you.

Dwight Yoakam

#32. I played music and sang from my earliest memories. The first pictures of me show me wandering around with a guitar that was larger than I was, and it became almost second nature to me.

Dwight Yoakam

#33. I tried to pay some small tribute to A Man and a Woman (1966) with the recurring musical theme.

Dwight Yoakam

#34. A voice expressing emotion in a musical way moves on. It's like the finale of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - the world turns in on itself, as a universe unto itself, in the shape of one human being.

Dwight Yoakam

#35. As a writer, I always tend to take the liberty and the great artistic luxury of a composite form of writing.

Dwight Yoakam

#36. Buddy , you might think that I've lost my mind. But mister, I'd pay twice to do it one more time.

Dwight Yoakam

#37. I'll never quit playing country music, or at least acknowledging it, always, as the cornerstone of what I am.

Dwight Yoakam

#38. It's meant to reaffirm the validity of that music - clean, minimalist, honest, classic music.

Dwight Yoakam

#39. I'm a thousand miles from nowhere, time don't matter to me. I'm a thousand miles from nowhere and there's not place that I want to be.

Dwight Yoakam

#40. In the dark morning silence, I placed a gun to her head. She wore red dresses, but now she lay dead.

Dwight Yoakam

#41. I think actors are at the mercy of the opportunities presented to them. So you kind of have to wait for them to choose you. My music is insular - I can choose that.

Dwight Yoakam

#42. In addition, I'm finishing a track for the movie 'Waking Up In Reno', but there are numerous other singers I look forward to recording with in the near future.

Dwight Yoakam

#43. I needed to get into a nightclub and stand up and present the material that way. I needed to present it live.

Dwight Yoakam

#44. In the past 3-4 years I've developed a habit of keeping numerous small cassette recorders in my house and in a bag with me so that I'm able to commit to tape memory song ideas on a constant basis.

Dwight Yoakam

#45. I like order. It allows me to have chaos in my head.

Dwight Yoakam

#46. It became a metaphor for the lives of the people in this film and for the Old West, for the abandonment that occurred in the early part of the 20th century.

Dwight Yoakam

#47. 'm really proud of it. To me, it's a movie about character behavior and the pecking order of the pack, as well as the central character's massive survival guilt.

Dwight Yoakam

#48. We started shooting, and then Jodie found out she was pregnant. Forest broke it to me - he'd gone to work and heard it on the radio! It seemed like the movie was doomed. But, like these characters, there was a disregard for all the signs along the way.

Dwight Yoakam

#49. I don't regret any of the musical decisions I have made.

Dwight Yoakam

#50. I am probably the last of a generation able to gain an education in country music by osmosis, by sitting in a '64 Ford banging the buttons on the radio.

Dwight Yoakam

#51. I quit eating red meat a long time ago. I'm a vegetarian, but not by a moral issue or any kind of stand. I still eat dairy. And I quit eating sugar about the same time I quit eating red meat, but I eat fruit.

Dwight Yoakam