I had pretty much raised my kids and my first wife and I were divorced, so I began, in earnest, to start my musical career again. Going for the big record deal and all of that.
I was captured by music at a really early age. I was really captured by it. Everything about it. It was my mother… It was my father… It was my play thing. It was my toy. It was the best thing in my life.
Everything that Traffic ever did, I'd give Steve a complete lyric, titled, written out with the verse, the bridge, the shape and rhyme and then Steve had to figure out how the meter of the words would fit musically.
At first it was a bit daunting, but once I started to do it, the more I got into it, the more I started enjoying it and being able to say things lyrically that I would normally have to say musically.
To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is." [ ; NEH 2003 Jefferson Lecturer interview profi...
If you schlep a shit job everyday, keep and feed a little secret life--whether it's writing, art, running, music, your thoughts. It's yours.
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.
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.
I frequently compose out the entire metric structure of a piece in modified cyclic form, where each cyclic revolution undergoes some form of 'variation' much as if measure lengths were concrete musical 'material.'
Even though I know who I am, musically I'm a blank canvas. I know what colors I want to use, but I don't know what picture I want to paint yet.
want people to rock out in the car and not care that people are watching, I love that feeling when the sequences are all perfect and you can just press play. I want the music to take you on a journey.
Music has touched me deeply, sometimes to tears. But at the same time it's been life-affirming, because I've been grateful for the fact that I'm alive and human and capable of being so moved.
A musical film is my idea of heaven. You can pre-record, you don't have to sing live. Singing live was the bit I hated the most. I never felt like a confident singer.
I mean, I think I liked every band I ever played in because each band was different, each band had a different concept, and each band leader was different... different personalities and musical tastes.
So what I'm trying to say is from a musical aspect for anybody to say that whatever they're doing in Florida is not Hip Hop or whatever they're doing in LA is not Hip Hop, who are these people to say that?
The smallest component of the human molecule is a vibration - the equivalent to a musical note. Taking the time to learn more self-awareness at this level creates life experiences beyond that of all the greatest symphonies ever heard
'Flying Down to Rio' established RKO as a leader in musical film production throughout the 1930s. The film helped to rescue the studio from its financial straits and it gave a real boost to my movie career.
That was more or less coincidental in the sense that my parents wanted me to come back to New York because that's the center of musical activity still to this day, more or less, and so I auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera.
Poetry, music, forests, oceans, solitude--they were what developed enormous spiritual strength. I came to realize that spirit, as much or more than physical conditioning, had to be stored up before a race.
I believe that the brain has evolved over millions of years to be responsive to different kinds of content in the world. Language content, musical content, spatial content, numerical content, etc.
If Wagner lived today, he would probably work with film instead of music. He already knew back then that the Great Art Form would include a sort of fourth dimension; it was really film he was talking about.
