Top 100 Quotes About Music Musicians
#1. Rock musicians, and a vast array of popular-music musicians, due to their wealth, acquired through the mass of their notoriety, are able to be listened to and heard and thus are able to effect change on an international level.
Bill Dixon
#2. Great stories, well written and heartfelt. Prisoner of SouthernRock is an engaging and entertaining celebration of southern music, musicians and characters.
Chuck Leavell
#3. Music is a spiritual thing, you don't play with music. If you play with music you will die young. You see, because when the higher forces give you the gift of music ... musicians hip, it must be well used for the gift of humanity.
Fela Kuti
#4. I think the future looks great for music, musicians, bass players, and all we love about music.
Billy Sheehan
#5. I do the work with friends who are musicians as well. I'm working on a piece of music and I have an idea of who I want on the vocals, but I don't really have a list.
Paul Van Dyk
#6. Dave walked closer to me, his dark eyes combing my every move. "Do you always hold your guitar like that?"
I dropped my pick. "Do you always shop at Hot Topic?
Tara Kelly
#7. I think it's a shame when you come across young actors and musicians who haven't had the time to learn their craft. It doesn't matter if it's acting or music; you really have to learn how to do it from the bottom up because unless you have a great work ethic ... fame is a terrible thing to have.
Denis Leary
#9. Regarding jam sessions: Jazz musicians are the only workers I can think of who are willing to put in a full shift for pay and then go somewhere else and continue to work for free.
George Carlin
#10. The things I see every day inspire my sound and lyrics, like certain people and situations that stick out in my mind. There are also certain musicians I love whose music and styles inspire me.
Birdy
#11. With pop music and pop musicians, you know everything about everyone all the time, particularly their physical appearance. With female musicians, that's made a big thing of, and I think people, certainly with me, have appreciated a bit of mystery.
Lorde
#12. I know too many musicians that have to tour on the same 10 songs, and they burn out. They get back to their house, and they have no reason to write new music. They are music'd out.
Justin Vernon
#13. There are only so many letters in the alphabet. When I talk to young musicians or authors and they ask for advice, I say, 'You gotta learn all the letters of your own personal alphabet. With music, you need to know all the different kinds of music and everything in and around your given instrument.'
David Lee Roth
#14. My dad's side of the family had lots of artists and musicians. There's an emotional, quite sentimental quality to Slavic culture. It's very open, it loves art, it loves music, it loves literature. It's very warm, it's very up, it's very down. I would celebrate that.
Nick Clegg
#15. He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology is a modern development, and has not yet been understood.
E. M. Forster
#16. There is a big, beautiful world that could be destroyed by selfishness and foolishness. We musicians have it within our power to help save it. In a small way, every single one of us counts.
Pete Seeger
#17. For some reason I can't explain, artist and musicians tend to look younger than our age. Being in music, you need this youthful sense of discovery and wonder for what you're doing and keep your imagination open. That's a youthful way of looking at life and I think that reflects in how you age.
Joshua Bell
#18. Verbal communication about music is impossible except among musicians.
Virgil Thomson
#19. When the musical keyboard was created in the 1970's, you had electronic geeks that had no background in music created these devises and gave them to musicians that had no background in electronics. The result was some of the wierd sounds that came out in the '70s.
David Bowie
#20. A cough is the basic sign of inattention. Musicians never, in my experience, cough when playing in public.
Charles Rosen
#21. I'm always trying to think of something clever and fun to do with the music. There's so many cool things musicians and artists can do with their products.
Robert Coppola Schwartzman
#22. I'm not a great inventor from scratch. What I do is to use, steal, acquire, reproduce or re-cycle music from other musicians.
Michael Nyman
#24. We want to generate the electricity of peace through music, and it's a thrill to know that the super-creative, enthusiastic musicians of our world are with us to achieve this goal.
David Lynch
#25. One of the best things about Kickstarter and crowdfunding and the collapse of the music business is a lot of artists like me have been forced to face our own weird mess about ourselves and what we thought it meant to become musicians.
Amanda Palmer
#26. When you play music you discover a part of yourself that you never knew existed.
Bill Evans
#27. A quiet mind allows the artist to tap into the wellspring of Divine Music within.
Kenny Werner
#28. Great music seems to come from a lot of angst, and that angst is from great musicians getting together with intense chemistry. When that chemistry isn't there, people tend not to write great music.
Peter Hook
#29. If there are no pop stars churning out those mind-numbing songs, then there are no musicians in the booths backing them up, no clerks running back and forth with tapes, no shop owners selling the music. Taking out one person at the top destroys thousands at the bottom.
Kiera Cass
#30. I've worked with some great orchestras and amazing classical musicians, but I don't like the conceptualization of classical music as an elitist form of art.
Serj Tankian
#31. It's hard to view myself sometimes as even in the same league as other musicians, mainly because there's so much music before me. I feel overinformed by different styles and different possibilities.
Ryan Adams
#32. I know a lot of great musicians that don't know they're even great, because mangers try and make them feel belittled like they're not worth a crap.
Jim "Dandy" Mangrum
#33. Attracting musicians is rather like inviting flies over to tea: they are tolerable for half an hour, but when they begin to touch the food, you either wish they would go home or die.
Michelle Franklin
#34. Most of my arguments with musicians through the years have had more to do with their attitude about music, or their attitude about their own lives, or their personal responsibility. Music has never really been the big centerpiece of the fight.
Billy Corgan
#35. I grew up in a house that was always happy, and my family was always music, music. I started playing percussion very young, because I had some uncles who were musicians and all my aunts were singers.
Ronaldinho
#36. I think that's really important, that kids get exposed to music as soon as they can - not necessarily to become musicians, but at least have an outlet. It's an art form that's easily accessible to young ears.
Joe Perry
#37. In the end, I think musicians know that getting up in the morning and making music you love doesn't necessarily mean that you deserve billions of dollars or worship from anybody.
Danger Mouse
#38. Music, in all of its variations and venues, is the world's oldest social network.
Richard J. Alley
#39. A good crowd had formed along the sidewalk and the concrete ledge that bordered Louis Armstrong Park. The anticipation was dizzying...New Orleans had the big-boy parades and [Jackson & Billy] couldn't wait to attend a second line...
Hunter Murphy
#40. I've made money, and I've been ripped off. I've had creative freedom, and I've been pressured to make hits. I have dealt with diva behavior from crazy musicians, and I have seen genius records by wonderful artists get completely ignored. I love music. I always will.
David Byrne
#41. Most musicians I know don't just play music on Saturday night. They play music every day. They are always fiddling around, letting the notes lead them from one place to another. Taking still photographs is like that. It is a generative process. It pulls you along.
Henry Wessel Jr.
#42. The best musicians know this music isn't about "schools" at all. Like my father says, "There's only one school, the school of 'Can you play?
Wynton Marsalis
#43. Man, I would demand that artist come to the table with better variety. I would demand that musicians know music history, not just Hip-Hop, so that we could understand. The better your 'listening ear' is, the better your music will be.
Pharoahe Monch
#44. Music is like having a conversation. All musicians inspire each other, and they're all geared to play something that matters.
Vince Gill
#45. That is how I felt, watching the musicians play. I couldn't stand it. The everyday lack of my music was like a toothache I had grown used to. I could live with it. But having what I wanted dangled in front of me was more than I could bear.
Patrick Rothfuss
#46. Angel, you got checkout girls in these here grocery stores cain't feed their own kids right, jazz musicians workin' for the post office because music don't pay the charge of admission to a nightclub. You might love your work but one day you wake up and find that your work don't love you.
Walter Mosley
#47. Kansas City, I would say, did more for jazz music, black music, than any other influence at all. Almost all their joints that they had there, they used black bands. Most musicians who amounted to anything, they would flock to Kansas City because that's the place where jobs were plentiful.
Jesse Stone
#48. I love music and I love musicians and when I hear something that's great, I always say it's like you go to a movie and you can't wait to tell your friends about it.
Zach Braff
#49. I've always wanted to make music like people write plays, so I was inspired by writers as much as musicians.
St. Vincent
#50. Bad music is what will ruin music, not the instruments musicians choose to play.
Miles Davis
#51. I was very drawn to music of all types, from Beethoven to Jimi Hendrix. There were musicians and composers who obviously were expressing a vision that was beyond the mundane.
Frederick Lenz
#52. My father was the proprietor of a music shop on Forty-third Street, where many of the finest performers and musicians of the day would come to shop. He knew the classical repertoire inside out.
E.L. Doctorow
#54. The technical history of modern harmony is a history of growth of toleration by the human ear of chords that at first sounded discordant and senseless to the main body of contemporary professional musicians.
George Bernard Shaw
#55. The first impulse of a great number of civilized musicians ... is to protest ourdeclaration that the music in Hungary belongs to the Gypsies.
Franz Liszt
#56. I didn't want to be precious about things. Of course, the idea is to make great music, but if you have great musicians up there, it gives me some leeway to play around a little bit.
Fiona Apple
#57. I don't know what Swiss musicians need to do to be heard beyond the borders of their own country. It was always clear to me that I belong everywhere, that music belongs everywhere. It simply never occurred to me that I had to limit myself to a country.
Sophie Hunger
#58. People are flowers. Music is water. Musicians are the hose.
Carlos Santana
#59. Music companies and buyers are not too encouraging towards independent musicians. Everyone wants to play safe and go with established names, but unless one breaks this routine, no new talent will come and survive.
Kailash Kher
#60. Most musicians remain poor. But the music that they make, even if it does not bring them millions, gives millions of people happiness.
Langston Hughes
#61. I think the world is very much embracing this whole concept of musicians going out and playing their instruments and playing music for music as opposed to music that has something to do with some form of image or imagery.
Les Claypool
#62. I think a lot of musicians play for the playback. I mean, that's the joy of recording - you want to hear what you've done and what you've contributed - but never listening to that playback kind of removes the intellectual part of making music, and it removes the tendency to be revisionist.
Jenny Lewis
#63. If I knew what it was going to look like, I wouldnt be so excited to be a part of it. Jazz is a music of surprise; its a music of spontaneity. I think jazz musicians live
I know I do
for being surprised and not knowing whats going to come next.
Joshua Redman
#64. We're musicians. We make music for a living. It's that simple. Nothing else matters.
Eddie Van Halen
#65. I have always been a person who is concerned with the dignity of jazz music and the way jazz musicians have been treated and are treated, and the fact that the music has not been given the kind of due that it deserves.
Sonny Rollins
#66. Some musicians, man, you hear the note almost before they hit it. Jimi, Coltrane and Charlie Parker were like that ...
Carlos Santana
#67. But an innovation, to grow organically from within, has to be based on an intact tradition, so our idea is to bring together musicians who represent all these traditions, in workshops, festivals, and concerts, to see how we can connect with each other in music.
Yo-Yo Ma
#68. Way back in the old days, say in Europe of the Middle Ages, you had an aristocracy, and they could afford to pay for musicians. The kings and queens had musicians in the castles, and that developed into symphony orchestras and what we call "Classical music" now.
Pete Seeger
#69. I think the labyrinth is an interesting metaphor for our lives as musicians. We're always being drawn toward the center of it because that's where the mystery is. What is music? It's a journey.
Sting
#70. There were musicians that influenced me, but they weren't all women. Teena Marie was a big influence because she wrote and produced her own music, which let me know that women could write and produce their own music, which was an empowering moment for me.
Queen Latifah
#71. When I hear music that parents hate, or older musicians hate, I know that's the new music. When I hear older people saying, 'I hate Rap or Techno' I rush to it.
George Clinton
#72. I'm just lucky to have the type of friends and musicians and people dedicated to my music that I do.
Wynton Marsalis
#73. Jonny Lang has the power to move the music into the next millennium by reaching the ears of a new generation. The great musicians have the power to break all of the 'isms'-race, age, sex, et cetera. Jonny Lang is one of those musicians.
Luther Allison
#74. Musicians are often asked to answer for an entire culture, or for an entire movement. It's a process of commodification. It becomes packaged and summarized in a word like 'emo' or 'grunge' ... or 'folk music.' I think that's just language itself, trying to understand the mysteries of the world.
Sufjan Stevens
#75. There are five things to write songs about: I'm leaving you. You're leaving me. I want you. You don't want me. I believe in something. Five subjects, and 12 notes. For all that, we musicians do pretty well.
Elvis Costello
#76. We're deaf men working as musicians; we play the music but we can't hear it.
Sebastian Faulks
#77. He would talk about how important all music was. How it took us
not just the people who played it but the people who heard it
to a place above the normal boring world.
Jon Skovron
#78. The music industry is dominated by guys. I work with men 98 percent of the time - producers, arrangers, musicians, engineers.
Shakira
#79. Out of doing all that experimentation with sound I decided I wanted to do it with live musicians. To take repetition, take music fragments and make it live. Musicians would be able to play it and create this kind of abstract fabric of sound.
Terry Riley
#80. My interactions with musicians have been simply that: interactions with musicians. Issues of gender, or anything else beyond the music-making, have in my experience played no role in whether or not a musician has been able to articulate my intentions as a composer.
Michael Hersch
#81. I do covers for CDs and LPs of music that I like, reissues of old-time music, and then I'm inspired to make some kind of drawing based on this love of the music. I don't do album covers or CD covers for groups or musicians I don't like or have no interest in.
Robert Crumb
#82. You should play with real musicians; the best music comes from real people interacting with each other.
John Fogerty
#83. Nashville has always been competitive. My granddaddy called it the Hillbilly Babylon.
Hunter S. Jones
#84. It bothers me when musicians listen to music from the '60s and try and recreate it. Those people weren't trying to recreate music from the '20s. Why do it?
James Vincent McMorrow
#85. I think my music has always been a mixture, depending on whom I'm working with - what band, what musicians, what producer.
Matisyahu
#86. Music that is created with the primary aim of impressing other musicians fails to connect with the vast majority of listeners.
Carl Orr
#87. I still don't understand the music industry that much. Everything I learned was from hanging out with rock musicians in studios. I certainly have respect for those who make music their livelihood.
Brendan Fraser
#88. Like most musicians, I'm good at becoming immersed in the music that I am currently working on. We seldom lift up our heads to contemplate even the music we will be doing in the future, let alone what we've done in the past.
Tony Levin
#89. All people are musicians" Wit countered. "The question is whether or not they share their songs.
Brandon Sanderson
#90. Blues musicians don't retire. They drop.
Buddy Guy
#91. The Internet had been a BIG help with my career. My advice to musicians, Internet is the key. It gets your music heard all across the world.
Soulja Boy
#92. They had taken to the movement unlike anything he had ever seen, and he thought that should this venture of the Jews prove successful, the new state would be filled with dancers and musicians, but especially dancers, for dancing like nothing else says: I am still alive.
Mark Helprin
#93. So much of Jazz doesn't have an audience other than music students or musicians.
Branford Marsalis
#94. The thing I like about 'Nashville,' it just happens to be about musicians, and all the music is practical, meaning it's performed at a concert or during a rehearsal.
Will Chase
#95. Classical music gradually lost popularity because it is too complicated: you need twenty-five or thirty skilled musicians just to hum it properly. So people began to develop regular music.
Dave Barry
#96. The music that I make, the younger musicians are referring to it as 'stretch' music.
Christian Scott
#97. It's funny, when bands or younger musicians ask me: 'So, what does it take to make it?' Well, first explain to me what you mean by 'making it': Do you want to be a rock star or do you want music to be your livelihood?
Eddie Van Halen
#98. When you work with great musicians, they are always a part of you ... their spirits are walking around in me, so they're still here and passing it on to others.
Miles Davis
#99. Musicians don't retire; they stop when there's no more music in them.
Louis Armstrong
#100. I'm forever near a stereo saying, 'What the fuck is this garbage?' And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Nick Cave
