Music Influences Quotes

#1. I'd say the music influences the writing - the music and rhythm of the prose - much more than the writing influences the music.

Rob Roberge

#2. I think music influences fashion and has done so for generations.

Georgia Jagger

#3. Music has always been transnational; people pick up whatever interests them, and certainly a lot of classical music has absorbed influences from all over the world.

Yo-Yo Ma

#4. I always wanted to do music that influences and inspires each generation.

Michael Jackson

#5. I'm trying to be me and embrace all the parts of me that have grown up, listened to more music and soaked up more influences.

John Legend

#6. I couldn't imagine what it's like to be a journalist talking about music. You're left with empty descriptions; you probably have to make up a sort of weird cocktail of band influences and references to other music to get your point across.

Ariel Pink

#7. 'The Beatles' did whatever they wanted. They were a collection of influences adapted to songs they wanted to write. George Harrison was instrumental in bringing in Indian music. Paul McCartney was a huge Little Richard fan. John Lennon was into minimalist aggressive rock.

Chris Cornell

#8. What we seem to perceive influences what we feel, and what we feel influences what we say we perceive

Jenefer Robinson

#9. The E Street band casts a pretty wide net. Our influences go all the way back to the early primitive garage music, and also, we've had everything in the band from jazz players to Kansas City trumpet players to Nils Lofgren, one of the great rock guitarists in the world.

Bruce Springsteen

#10. To deny that music powerfully influences our thoughts and conduct is either ignorant or a deliberate lie. Anyone who listens to music has been moved by it. It's music, that's the point.

Dessa Darling

#11. My influences in this world have always been Crazy Horse and Malcolm X, my overall influences. But I was influenced by rock n' roll, blues, and country music. I was influenced by singers.

John Trudell

#12. Personally, I love the cookie monster grunts. I like how they alienate listeners. We sound the way we sound. We're individuals. We don't all like the same music. Everybody contributes their own influences, style, and history.

David Pajo

#13. I hope we can keep doing it this way - making music and art that are pure products of our influences while not really having to let the whole celebrity side of it get in the way. Then maybe more virtual bands will come out and do the same thing.

Damon Albarn

#14. I'm a businesswoman. I am a music lover. I like for people to like my music. When you listen to top 40 radio, you hear pop stuff. You hear rock stuff. You hear all these different influences.

Lee Ann Womack

#15. It's quite interesting that in my growing up I had several influences. We had gospel music on campus. R&B music was, of course, the community, and radio was country music. So I can kind of see where all the influences came from.

Lionel Richie

#16. My big influences are Joni Mitchell, and a lot of classical and Indian music, as well as Nina Simone and the personal blues and jazz of Billie Holiday. Other influences for me include Bjork, Nick Drake, and Sufjan Stevens.

Yael Naim

#17. My influences are vast and varied. I was into classic rock at the same time that I was into hip-hop. It was just that hip-hop was the first music that I got really really into. Rock was right on its tail.

Paul Banks

#18. Any new ideas go into PiL. My inspiration is everything that the human being gets up to. I don't listen to any music when I'm in PiL-zone, because influences can poison your well. Otherwise, I listen to anything.

John Lydon

#19. Although my music is electronic, it has a lot of influences from my past, which is all sorts of genres; I've been in a rock-metal band for a long time, and I still feel like, personally, I have a lot of influence from that. My classical influence, you can find spots here and there.

Zedd

#20. Sam Phillips always encouraged me to do it my way, to use whatever other influences I wanted, but never to copy ... if there hadn't been a Sam Phillips, I might still be working in a cotton field.

Johnny Cash

#21. There's not one thing in particular that influences my music, but I write about what I know. It's based in personal experience. That's not to say all the songs are biographical, because sometimes it's what I've seen in others' lives.

Holly Golightly

#22. My main influences are pop and folk music - Bob Lind, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, the Motown collection, The Zombies, Elliott Smith, and a ton of 70's AM radio hits. I love powerpop too.

Greta Salpeter

#23. Everyone has their parent's [music] collection which is strongly influences what you listen to as a kid. You have no choice. You have to listen to whatever they're bumpin. I grew up with what they listened to a lot.

Ryan Lewis

#24. When my dad played me 'Walking Man,' I heard those chord changes and that melody, it completely blew me away. Maybe you wouldn't really hear the James Taylor influences in my music, but they're definitely buried in there.

Charlie Puth

#25. We've always had a lot of different influences and we've always liked catchy music from the Beatles to Cheap Trick to Elvis Costello.

Chuck Comeau

#26. I guess I would call my music 'blues punk.' There's a lot of influences.

Benjamin Booker

#27. I love fashion. For me, it's always interesting because I like to be able to mix up different styles and different brands, kind of like how my music taste or personality is. There's lots of influences.

Tinashe

#28. My influences are with Irish music, church music and classical music,

Enya

#29. I'm not inspired by songwriting at all; that took place years ago. I'm pretty well established, as far as my influences go. I don't listen to music anymore. It all sounds the same to me.

Mose Allison

#30. I know we play a part in the story of progressive music, but for us those influences are the real fathers, the ones that we were interested in.

John Petrucci

#31. I have come to use the pan-Celtic history, which spans from 500 BC to the present, as a creative springboard. The music I am creating is a result of traveling down that road and picking up all manner of themes and influences, which may or may not be overtly Celtic in nature.

Loreena McKennitt

#32. I'm a mad thinker in general. I think about everything, all the time. Especially when I write music, a lot of the influences come from personal experiences or from being on the outside looking in, being that person who witnessed things that stuck with me throughout my life.

Adam Hicks

#33. I was going to go to college and graduate and move to New York and do the Broadway thing. That's where a lot of my influences vocally and writing come from. Then I did some covers, and towards the end of college, I saw it was a path I could take. I wrote more pop music.

Sam Tsui

#34. I definitely love music that's coming out now, there's some really exciting fresh artists coming through which is really cool. I guess it's from old and new, where my influences are based.

Ella Henderson

#35. Any saxophone player will have those influences come through in their music in a very different way. I can listen to the same 10 sax players as someone else for my entire life, and we'll both play completely differently. That's the beauty of being a musician.

Kenny G

#36. In Holland, things were pretty stale for me. Even though there were a lot of good influences and a certain openness to music and art and literature, I just wanted to go somewhere less familiar - somewhere bigger.

Ari Marcopoulos

#37. What motivates it is life. Life is everything. Life influences my music and brings it forth. Life is always changing, so I'm always hearing new music.

Lenny Kravitz

#38. During the writing process, I tend not to listen to too much music. I obviously wear a lot of influences on my sleeve, but if I was listening to too many records, I would turn into too much of a monkey.

Jay Reatard

#39. I wasn't allowed to listen to a lot of music growing up. It wasn't until I started to make my gospel record when I was around 14 or 15 that I started to be exposed to more outside influences.

Katy Perry

#40. I think that our lyrics are definitely dark, but I know for a fact that we pull our inspiration from a million different influences. We listened to everything growing up. Our music isn't just 'opera metal' or 'gothic pop' it's just Evanescence.

Evanescence

#41. My influences were mostly gospel. So I was playing my twisted Jewish equivalent of gospel music over his twisted equivalent of rock and roll music. And it was a very excellent marriage.

Al Kooper

#42. Janis Joplin is definitely one of my biggest influences. She taught me how to feel music, and I don't think there's anyone like her that could bring such pain and emotion to a song.

LeAnn Rimes

#43. My influences are jazz, blues, European classical music; they are rock music and pop music. So many kinds of music. World music from different countries like India and China. I think that would be a shame not to take advantage and do something ... not unique, because I don't have this pretension.

Rokia Traore

#44. Color directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul.

Wassily Kandinsky

#45. I buy records from all across the board. I get kind of a hybrid of influences in my own music.

Jason Mraz

#46. Growing up with country, R&B, gospel, and classical music from my grandmother and pop, Tuskegee was the perfect melting pot for my influences as a writer.

Lionel Richie

#47. The nature of music is mysterious and so much so that it generates strong emotions within us. It moves along passages that reach the most intimate areas of our psyche without being tried by prejudices or influences of any kind.

Andrea Bocelli

#48. If it weren't for how esoteric the art world likes to be, I would love actually to play the music in the shows, painting the music that influences me most.

Damian Loeb

#49. Everything we (the Grateful Dead) ever did was a demonstration of the value of cross-fertilization, It was unconscious at first, but when we started looking at each other, we had all these different influences ... Bobby Weir used to call it electric Dixieland.

Phil Lesh

#50. Influences come from everywhere. I don't really feel like I had too many influences for the first record because I grew up listening to music in church, and that was pretty much it. I didn't really grow up listening to AC/DC and all those bands.

Avril Lavigne

#51. You don't just have to be influenced by rock, or goth, anymore. It's okay to say, 'My influences are Tin Pan music from Bali and Rihanna.' There are still so many combinations that haven't been done yet.

Grimes

#52. Avenues - television, magazines, movies, music, friends, malls, and catalogs, to name a few. A steady diet of these worldly influences will shape our view of what is valuable, what is beautiful, and what is important in life.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss

#53. Jazz has the ability to absorb & transform influences from diverse musical styles.

Andrew S. Gilbert

#54. Latin music has many international influences - pop, rock, country, Brazilian sounds, and alternative styles.

Ednita Nazario

#55. There are a lot of influences from different countries in my music. For example, I chose the guitar in my music, I think that it is a feminine instrument, so when I do not sing, the music expresses my voice.

Paulina Rubio

#56. I'm still kind of a hapless character in my everyday life. But when it comes to the writing, my influences are very old influences. I love American music of absolutely all stripes, including show tunes, advertising jingles, theme tunes from quiz shows, all kinds of American music.

Nick Lowe

#57. As far as spiritual influences in Christian music, I would say Crystal Lewis - a lot of her songs especially. The ministry she has through her songs has really hit me.

Stacie Orrico

#58. I always want to do music that inspires or influences another generation. You want what you create to live, be it sculpture or painting or music. Like Michelangelo, he said, I know the creator will go, but his work survives. That is why to escape death, I attempt to bind my soul to my work.

Michael Jackson

#59. It was not really the external influences that made me a singer. Music was within me. I was full of it.

Lata Mangeshkar

#60. Jay Z in many ways is a rock artist. In the sense that they've used hard rock, punk rock, psychedelic rock aesthetics and influences in their music. When you see Kanye West, he has a full band playing. Jay Z has a full band playing with Marshalls.

Ian Astbury

#61. Everything in life influences my music. I've always used songwriting as a means to share what I think is profound.

Jason Mraz

#62. We live in a post-authentic world, and today authenticity is a house of mirrors. It's all just what you're bringing when the lights go down. It's your teachers, your influences, and your personal history. At the end of the day, it's the power and purpose of your music that still matters.

Bruce Springsteen

#63. I'm from the Bob Wills and the Little Richard school of music. Bob Wills did what the hell he thought, Little Richard did what he thought, and those were my big influences.

Buck Owens

#64. Music and literature have always and continue to be massive influences. Writers such as Seamus Heaney and Frank McGuinness. I have always admired the humanitarians that I knew growing up in Derry whose influence steered me in the direction of some of the work that I have chosen in the past.

Bronagh Gallagher

#65. I'm an Australian, and when I grew up much of my influences were American - blues music and country music, all that sort of thing.

Nick Cave

#66. Music is so important. It changes thinking, it influences everybody, whether they know it or not. Music knows no boundary lines.

Irving Berlin

#67. My songwriting is so influenced by orchestrated music, dramatic, super glam rock-y stuff. Two of my biggest influences in songwriting were Elton John and Freddie Mercury.

Brandi Carlile