Quotes About Musicians And Music

#1. In spite of the bans which musicians and music teachers have placed on it, the people still demand and enjoy Ragtime.

James Weldon Johnson

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. Music, in all of its variations and venues, is the world's oldest social network.

Richard J. Alley

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. Music is like having a conversation. All musicians inspire each other, and they're all geared to play something that matters.

Vince Gill

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. Some musicians, man, you hear the note almost before they hit it. Jimi, Coltrane and Charlie Parker were like that ...

Carlos Santana

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. I'm just lucky to have the type of friends and musicians and people dedicated to my music that I do.

Wynton Marsalis

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. Great stories, well written and heartfelt. Prisoner of SouthernRock is an engaging and entertaining celebration of southern music, musicians and characters.

Chuck Leavell

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. Musicians wake up and create a more loving community by creating heavier music.

Cass McCombs

#55. I found my God in music and the arts, with writers like Hermann Hesse, and musicians like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Little Walter. In some way, in some form, my God was always there, but now I have learned to talk to him.

Eric Clapton

#56. Sometimes, I think the way the music business has been destructive and the way the fans are been put through it and try to navigate through it, so much is so foreign to what musicians would actually want to do or what would be natural to them.

Beck

#57. And when my spirit wants no stimulus or nourishment save music, I know it is to be sought in cemeteries: the musicians hide in the tombs; from grave to grave flute trills, harp chords answer one another.

Italo Calvino

#58. The bottom line is that musicians love to make music and always will.

Jennifer Lopez

#59. The musicians are good and their music is catchy - it pulls the kids in in droves. Mike Bickle admitted to me that the music was a big part of their success at attracting young people.

Roger Ross Williams

#60. There are a lot of musicians I've met on Twitter where it was like, 'Hey, I like your music' - and then I ended up meeting them and it turned into a friendship.

Grimes

#61. Comedy is like music, and the way to make the best music is to have skilled musicians in your band.

Rashida Jones

#62. I want them to come away with discovering the music inside them. And not thinking about themselves as jazz musicians, but thinking about themselves as good human beings, striving to be a great person and maybe they'll become a great musician.

Charlie Haden

#63. The best musicians in the world were raised on the same kind of music I was raised on and that is black, soulful, authoritative, ultra-tight, ferocious, uppity, defiant music that from the Howlin' Wolf, the Muddy Waters, the Lightnin' Hopkins, the Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and Little Richard.

Ted Nugent

#64. But recently I began to feel that maybe I wouldn't be able to do what I want to do and need to do with American musicians, who are imprisoned behind these bars; music's got these bars and measures you know.

Sun Ra

#65. Many times it happens we live our life in chains and we never even know we have the key.

Eagles

#66. My parents were both very musically inclined, they were both songwriters and musicians, so we grew up in the house singing music together, and R&B had a huge strong arm in the foundation of my career.

Jesse McCartney

#67. There was the best teachers from the Czech Philharmonic, highly dedicated people, some of the best musicians in the world passing on the knowledge about the country, about the principles, and about the music.

Miroslav Vitous

#68. How great musicians demonstrate a mutual respect and trust on the bandstand can alter your outlook on the world and enrich every aspect of your life, understanding what it means to be a global citizen in the most modern sense.

Wynton Marsalis

#69. The magic of playing has to do with how much everyone wants it to succeed. If you have five players in a situation where the music is being improvised and one is determined it is not going to succeed, it won't succeed even if one of the musicians takes control.

Bill Dixon

#70. In chamber music, the audience can hear each instrument and understand (and feel) what the composer and the musicians have in mind as they play.

Karen DeCrow

#71. I consider music to be a service and I am trying to serve the music, the musicians and the audience the best I can at every moment

Jeff Coffin

#72. One of the things that's influenced me musically was my experience at Brown University. I was surrounded by musicians that I really admired, and felt challenged to come up with music, lyrics, and recordings that stood up to the expectations of those musicians and myself.

Lisa Loeb

#73. I do have shout-outs to bands and musicians I like in my books, but the musical references can be misunderstood. Often, I have people listening to music that I would never listen to personally, because it fits and defines their character.

George Pelecanos

#74. What people really should be able to be confident in is that the standards of music- making that classically trained musicians present is elite, it is the best and all of us as artists should be committed to that.

Lesley Garrett

#75. The art music of the West has developed through out its history by means of individual geniuses, and out of the soil supporting them; non-Western musicians were born, and grew like the grasses of the field.

Toru Takemitsu

#76. He turned around to see the bass drum popping and the horn sections pointing their instruments to the balconies and sending glorious notes to the rooftops.

Hunter Murphy

#77. We [musicians] are comfortable in front of the camera doing music videos, and it's almost a form of acting when we're doing music videos. We're acting out our own thoughts and what we've written down on paper.

Ludacris

#78. It has always seemed slightly uncomfortable, the idea of politicised musicians. Very few of them are clever enough to do it; if they're good at the political side, the music side suffers, and vice versa.

Robert Smith

#79. Being on 'Nashville' and working with some incredible people like T-Bone Burnett and Buddy Miller - so many wonderful, incredible musicians that I've been blessed to play with and observe - that has continued to shape the process of arranging music, writing music.

Jonathan Jackson

#80. The music is not part of this planet in a sense that the spirit of it is about happiness. Most musicians play earth things about what they know, but I found out that they are mostly unhappy and frustrated, and that creeps over into their music.

Sun Ra

#81. Like many musicians, I don't look back much ... only concentrate on what music I'm doing, and occasionally look ahead.

Tony Levin

#82. I'm no ethnomusicologist. There is a connection between the five-note scale used both in traditional Chinese music and the blues, but I don't really understand it. All I know is, whenever I play with Chinese musicians, we seem to belong to the same musical gene pool.

Abigail Washburn

#83. One of the things that's clear to me from interviews that I've read is that the more popular successful jazz musicians had audiences above and beyond the music community.

Branford Marsalis

#84. I love live performance and have huge admiration for people who can really do it. It's the same with music: I'll play a record and think that I'm not really into country or ragga. But, if it's live and the musicians are good, I'll listen to pretty much anything.

Helen McCrory

#85. Now as jazz musicians we're saying for this society, you can free up your imagination. You can proceed in an area without much information and you can function in an area without much information.

Paul Bley

#86. There were so many groups that I had in college, but I was always the solo singer. But what made it so unusual back in the day was that I was a black girl playing with all these white musicians, and I was also singing rock music on top of it.

Natalie Cole

#87. Some artists and indie musicians see Spotify fairly positively - as a way of getting noticed, of getting your music out there where folks can hear it risk-free.

David Byrne

#88. Athens, much like Austin, is a difficult music scene. There are so many musicians there that it is hard to get gigs and hard for people to take you seriously.

Corey Smith

#89. I think music piracy is forcing many people to look at the live aspect of the record industry as an income and in many ways that's what sets apart good music and musicians from the fly by night pop sensations.

Ben Howard

#90. My favorite records are by bands where the musicians are all playing like themselves, but those personalities connect in an exciting way and create music that is one cohesive unit. It's not catchy like a pop song, but it's a really cool song.

Dylan Baldi

#91. I'm always going to get more of a charge playing Chicago than I will Duluth or some place like that. Just because of the history and the people there are way more knowledgeable than a lot of other cities. It's an amazing music scene with some great bands and great musicians.

Matt Cameron

#92. My dad took me to all the best rock and punk shows when I was growing up and music has always been a part of my life. So I'm very interested in the music scene and I suppose that's why I've ended up going out with musicians. Dave Pirner is still one of my best friends.

Winona Ryder

#93. Forget scientists. The next space launch we should send up painters, poets and musicians. I'd be more interested in what they discover than anything that takes place in a test tube.

James Rozoff

#94. Musicians talk of nothing but money and jobs. Give me businessmen every time. They really are interested in music and art

Jean Sibelius

#95. The true beauty of music is that it connects people. It carries a message, and we, the musicians, are the messengers.

Roy Ayers

#96. I like characters. I like spirited characters whether they exist in fiction or real life. Whether they're the invention of artistic people or directors, musicians. I think music and art and fashion designers inspire me and I like characters.

Marc Jacobs

#97. I would advise all young musicians to not only experience and play chamber music, but to go to operas, speak to the singers, to explore and expand your horizons.

Wu Han

#98. People need to put my music in a perspective where they use other established artists from the past, and almost all the names I see related to my music are great musicians.

Sondre Lerche

#99. If you look at the history of popular music, the most successful musicians have started out being really marginal and esoteric. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Madonna. Prince. Bruce Springsteen. Fleetwood Mac. David Bowie. Public Enemy. Nirvana.

Moby

#100. Today all sounds belong to a continuous field of possibilities lying within the comprehensive dominion of music. Behold the new orchestra: the sonic universe! And the musicians: anyone and anything that sounds!

R. Murray Schafer