Alabama - they were the masters of that. They could come out with 'Mountain Music' or 'Tennessee River' and then turn around and come out with 'Feels So Right.' Go out and have fun and be those guys that like to party, then turn around and make every...
I had a portable 8-track player under all my ramps, cranking one of my four 8-tracks - Cars/'Candy-O,' Ramones/'Road To Ruin,' Cheap Trick/'Heaven Tonight' and the first Devo record. I don't remember skating without music.
With moviemaking, the audience always has to keep asking, 'What happens next?' If you have the wrong piece of music over a scene, people aren't going to get the scene. If you have the wrong camera angle, people aren't going to pay attention. That's a...
I was just very conscious that I could either bore people by having the music be similar for too long, or I could just wear them out and bore them in a different way by having it changing too much every minute or two minutes. So, there was that kind ...
I learned to play by ear before I learned music theory. For me, that makes sense. After all, children learn to speak before they read and write. The more you understand of music - how harmony and time signatures work, and what chords and inversions a...
I think I'm writing for an intelligent stranger - you know, in my mind I can't remember who coined that phrase first. I don't want to write anything that makes me cringe, first of all. I cringe a lot - mostly when I hear popular music.
I sure saw a lot of kids that I'm sure didn't know a lot about us, or we were definitely new to them. The kids who came up to me afterward, we'd talk about music, sign a lot of autographs. So I'm sure we made a lot of new fans.
Normally, things are viewed in these little segmented boxes. There's classical, and then there's jazz; romantic, and then there's baroque. I find that very dissatisfying. I was trying to find the thread that connects one type of music - one type of m...
My first album, 'Get Lifted,' was a hip-hop soul album that had some of its roots in the church, as far as the sonic choices, in the way that I sing and write songs. I have always had that as part of my background and part of my influence when I am m...
I went to see Alison Krauss and Union Station at Disney Hall and I would say it was one of the most astonishing sonic experiences I have had. It's an enormous room that's acoustically perfect. My interpretation of receiving music as a layman is that ...
I do music because I can just pick up my guitar and sing, and completely satisfy, instant gratification. I don't need a script, I don't people, I don't need anything, cameras, I just have myself and my guitar, or keyboard.
I am a musician. I didn't know I would be so when I was young. I do know that I have always heard music in my head that I wasn't hearing somewhere else and I 'needed' this music. And obedient to the laws of nature, I created into this vacuum.
I had written a tune called 'Shake, Rattle and Roll,' but the white stations refused to play it - they thought it was low-class black music. We thought what we needed was a new name. But a white disc jockey named Alan Freed laid on it, and he thought...
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...
I had a brother six years older than me, so I wasn't just listening to teenybopper stuff. My brother had the cooler music, but my parents had the Burt Bacharach, Tom Jones, the Association, the Fifth Dimension; these groups were un-cool, but I secret...
I like being a storyteller. I'm bored with myself; I like to write about others. I have a lot of names in my songs: Karen, Margaret, Mary Kay. Even if it's about me, I want to put it through someone else. The music is the soundtrack to the story.
Geez, I wish I could tell you I had a whole bunch of '80s hair bands, you know something you really wouldn't expect, but I don't know that the music police would be that surprised, because most of the stuff that I am influenced by is in evidence in t...
I find standard American the hardest. It really fits in a different place in your mouth. Southern, I find the easiest. If you talk to a dialect coach and you get sort of technical, where an English person keeps their voice in their throat, a Southern...
I have to admit I've found myself doing the same things that a lot of other rock stars do or are forced to do. Which is not being able to respond to mail, not being able to keep up on current music, and I'm pretty much locked away a lot. The outside ...
We were very rich culturally. One Sunday each month, we would do this thing called Chamber Pots at somebody's house. A classical music group would come over and we'd have dinner. There were thirty people - parents and kids - and we'd sit on the floor...
In college, I faced an interesting problem. I wanted to play music all the time and yet I wasn't ready for anyone to hear it. To remedy this, I took to retreating to stairwells as a safe place to sing and write music. It was there that I wrote most o...
