Quotes About Brian Eno

#1. Brian Eno developed systems to keep himself on edge and to keep himself in a position where he's generating ideas.

Jon Brion

#2. To be completely honest, I think if I hadn't been bullied into the band, I would have been happier as an art student. I would have been happier in a Brian Eno world.

Pete Townshend

#3. Drummond is many things, and one of those things is a magician. ( ... ) Art is magic, and so is pop. Bill Drummond is a cultural magician, and 45 is his logbook. Shelve alongside Brian Eno's A Year With Swollen Appendices. Hail Discordia !

Charles Shaar Murray

#4. I can't think of any musician or producer who has influenced me more than Brian Eno. From when he was in Roxy Music, producing Devo, the Talking Heads and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

Moby

#5. The only time that I've adopted characterization again since that point, for my own albums, has been an album called "Outside" that I did with Brian Eno .

David Bowie

#6. Some people are better at seeing things through to a logical conclusion as far as copying things they like from other people's records; they understand what Brian Eno did and they just do it.

Alexis Taylor

#7. I am a big Brian Eno fan - the first few Brian Eno records are just absolute gibberish and he came up with a lot of lyrics by writing down loads and loads of random sentences and streams, and I find meaning in that music, even though he'd probably say it's absolute gibberish.

Jay Watson

#8. I had ideas about music and sound and listening and time and so on that I wanted to pursue as an individual, and by doing that book, Brian [Eno] opened the door, and he decided to do a record based loosely on the book.

David Toop

#9. Brian Eno taught us how to use the Recording Studio as an instrument.

Jerry Harrison

#10. David Bowie worked with Brian Eno and dressed up in extraordinary clothes, but he was also a brilliant songwriter who captured the thoughts of a generation. He was hugely successful, without compromise.

Bat For Lashes

#11. Almost all the producers I know and dig, like Quincy Jones or Brian Eno, are really musicians first. I'm a composer, an orchestrator, an arranger and a musician first. I know how to write and rewrite songs, and the genius is really in the rewriting.

Nile Rodgers

#12. Of course, like anybody I repeat myself endlessly, but I don't know that I'm doing it, usually.

Brian Eno

#13. I think, if you spend a day or as many people do a life working only with that aspect of your being, the cerebrum connected to a finger, I feel that the rest of you atrophies, essentially.

Brian Eno

#14. The big message of gospel is that you don't have to keep fighting the universe; you can stop, and the universe is quite good to you. There is a loss of ego.

Brian Eno

#15. I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.

Brian Eno

#16. At the party, Rob Partridge said to me, "You gave hope to other balding men." My new epitaph: "Co-wrote a couple of decent songs and went bald shamelessly.

Brian Eno

#17. People tend to play in their comfort zone, so the best things are achieved in a state of surprise, actually.

Brian Eno

#18. The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement

Brian Eno

#19. It's insane that, since the Beatles and Dylan, it's assumed that all musicians should do everything themselves. It's that ridiculous, teenage idea that when Mick Jagger sings, he's telling you something about his own life. It's so arrogant to think that people would want to know about it anyway!

Brian Eno

#20. Composition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art.

Brian Eno

#21. I have lived in countries that were coming out of conflict: Ireland, South Africa, the Czech republic. People there are overflowing with energy.

Brian Eno

#22. What people call unemotional just doesnt have a single overriding emotion to it. The things that I like best are the ones that ambiguous on the emotional level.

Brian Eno

#23. I suppose I am reluctant about being any sort of 'star' and I didn't particularly want to be portrayed as one.

Brian Eno

#24. Whenever you listen to a piece of music, what you are actually doing is hearing the latest sentence in a very long story you've been listening to - all the pieces of music you've ever heard.

Brian Eno

#25. I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.

Brian Eno

#26. The way 'Lux' was made is that there are 12 sections in here, though two of them are joined together. So there are really 11 sections, in a sense, and each one uses five notes out of a palette of seven notes, and my palette is all the white notes on the piano. That was the original palette.

Brian Eno

#27. It's actually very easy for democracy to disappear.

Brian Eno

#28. As struggles go, being an artist isn't that much of one.

Brian Eno

#29. Sometimes something intrigues me about particular sounds, how they work together, and I think "Okay, I've found something here; I'm going to take it somewhere." And sometimes just to find a name for that sound, whatever it is, ends up becoming a title of the piece or becoming part of the title.

Brian Eno

#30. The reason I don't tour is that I don't know how to front a band. What would I do? I can't really play anything well enough to deal with that situation.

Brian Eno

#31. Ideas reflect the moment, and so you have to use them. If you store ideas, they wither.

Brian Eno

#32. I think generally playing live is a crap idea. So much of stage work is the presentation of personality, and I've never been interested in that.

Brian Eno

#33. I do sometimes look back at things I've written in the past, and think, 'I just don't remember being the person who wrote that.'

Brian Eno

#34. I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function.

Brian Eno

#35. I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

Brian Eno

#36. I do love being in my studio. Especially at night.

Brian Eno

#37. The reason conservatives cohere and radicals fight: everyone agrees about fears, no one about visions.

Brian Eno

#38. The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.

Brian Eno

#39. When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.

Brian Eno

#40. I often say to people that producing is the best-paid form of cowardice. When you produce things, you almost always get credit if it's a good record, but you hardly ever get the blame if it's not! You don't really take responsibility for your work.

Brian Eno

#41. If you've spent a long time developing a skill and techniques, and now some 14 year-old upstart can get exactly the same result, you might feel a bit miffed I suppose, but that has happened forever.

Brian Eno

#42. I want to rethink 'surrender' as an active verb.

Brian Eno

#43. It's amazing how quickly people get used to bad quality.

Brian Eno

#44. When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output.

Brian Eno

#45. Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven't been made easier technically.

Brian Eno

#46. I'm kind of an evangelical atheist.

Brian Eno

#47. My shows are not narratives.

Brian Eno

#48. I've always thought that art is a lie, an interesting lie. And I'll sort of listen to the "lie" and try to imagine the world which makes that lie true ... what that world must be like, and what would have to happen for us to get from this world to that one.

Brian Eno

#49. Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well.

Brian Eno

#50. Honor your mistake as a hidden intention.

Brian Eno

#51. Not many people bought Velvet Underground LPs, but those who did, started a band.

Brian Eno

#52. The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band

Brian Eno

#53. Everybody thinks that when new technologies come along that they're transparent and you can just do your job well on it. But technologies always import a whole new set of values with them.

Brian Eno

#54. I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, 'Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!'

Brian Eno

#55. You can't really imagine music without technology.

Brian Eno

#56. When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me.

Brian Eno

#57. Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!

Brian Eno

#58. If there is a new fascism, it won't come from skinheads and punks; it will come from people who eat granola and think they know how the world should be.

Brian Eno

#59. I think there's a lot of similarity between what people try to do with religion with what they want from art. In fact, I very specifically think that they are same thing. Not that religion and art are the same, but that they both tap into the same need we have for surrender.

Brian Eno

#60. Of all the things you can now do, which do you choose to do?

Brian Eno

#61. Every band I've worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they've gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

Brian Eno

#62. I think that sex, drugs, art and religion very much overlap with one another and sometimes one becomes another.

Brian Eno

#63. Agressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It's inevitable.

Brian Eno

#64. I can see the use and value of religion, just as I can see the use of mud wrestling, yoga, astronomy and sadomasochism. but I reject the idea that you can't be a deep human being without it or any of them.

Brian Eno

#65. I think we're about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.

Brian Eno

#66. Everything is an experiment until it has a deadline. That gives it a destination, context, and a reason.

Brian Eno

#67. For instance, I'm always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

Brian Eno

#68. Most game music is based on loops effectively.

Brian Eno

#69. People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

Brian Eno

#70. With all fashion, what we do is play at being somebody else. We play at inhabiting another kind of world.

Brian Eno

#71. I know that if I had a television in my flat I would convince myself that everything on it was really interesting. I would say, 'I'm a Celebrity - Get Me Out of Here!' is so sociologically fascinating that I think I'd better watch.

Brian Eno

#72. The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don't set out to say anything very important.

Brian Eno

#73. For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

Brian Eno

#74. When you make something you are always offering some choices and denying others.

Brian Eno

#75. I'm always interested in something when it isn't familiar to me.

Brian Eno

#76. The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them.

Brian Eno

#77. Songs that don't depend on composition depend instead on performance - so the fire has to be there in the playing.

Brian Eno

#78. The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten.

Brian Eno

#79. I've got nothing against records - I've spent my life making them - but they are a kind of historical blip.

Brian Eno

#80. I take sounds and change them into words.

Brian Eno

#81. Repetition doesn't really exist

Brian Eno

#82. The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.

Brian Eno

#83. Honour thy error as a hidden intention.

Brian Eno

#84. If you're in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.

Brian Eno

#85. Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don't fit in a very interesting way.

Brian Eno

#86. The problem with fine art is that in most cases people have to make a special excursion to go and look at it: they can't afford to own it. So it isn't really part of their life in the way that music can be.

Brian Eno

#87. Be the first to not do what nobody has ever thought of not doing before.

Brian Eno

#88. I don't like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.

Brian Eno

#89. Attention is what creates value. Artworks are made as well by how people interact with them - and therefore by what quality of interaction they can inspire.

Brian Eno

#90. The dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples' attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation.

Brian Eno

#91. All music has political dimensions because it suggests a way of being.

Brian Eno

#92. When I finish something, I want it out that day. Pop music is like the daily paper. Its got to be there then, not six months later.

Brian Eno

#93. I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness, and a better sense of humor.

Brian Eno

#94. At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

Brian Eno

#95. The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one's furniture.

Brian Eno

#96. Possessions are a way of turning money into problems.

Brian Eno

#97. We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.

Brian Eno

#98. When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.

Brian Eno

#99. American television really is pathetic.

Brian Eno

#100. Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You're glad someone's done it but you don't necessarily want to listen to it.

Brian Eno