I think all groups who don't fit in clearly with Western music have to think, 'How can I expand my market? Where else can I perform?'
I think it's almost a law of nature that there are only certain things that hit an emotive space, and that's what was always special for me about music: it made me feel something.
Most experiences are either sensual or intellectual. Chamber music, played by a small group so the listener can follow what each player is doing, is both.
The potential success that could come with signing with a major label didn't quite outweigh how important it was for me to make my music the way I knew it needed to be made.
I have to play as much of the game as I allow myself to get the music heard. But it's not unlike the rest of the world, so I'm not as up in arms about it as I could be.
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.
We want our music to reach everybody, so we're using the Internet. Every kid today is online, and we want to make sure our songs reach every one of them.
I write my songs and just play them, so there are not a whole lot of fireworks. As long as the music comes first, it's OK to have some fireworks. But not the other way around.
I'm depressed when I don't get to do music. Having to go back to doing something I don't like and am not passionate about would be a tough thing.
All I can do is focus on staying true to the style of music I write and sing because that is the only way it's going to come off as honest.
When I was little and I was introduced to Led Zeppelin, I didn't know what a zeppelin was or who Zeppelin was or what the machine was. The real meaning is whatever feelings and memories you attach to the music.
I would like to do a music person's story, a bio. I've wanted to do Aaliyah forever. But I don't want it to always be like, 'I'm singing again in a movie.'
When I was growing up listening to music, it was 2004, when The Starting Line and Finch and The Used were kind of my favorite bands.
People don't listen to terrestrial radio. They don't find their music that way. They don't get their news that way. They go to blogs. They go through Sirius/XM. They go through all these different places.
My interest in his new toy, the Theremin, isn't very big. It simply does not fit into my way of playing music. I do not want to fiddle around with my hands in the air.
Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.
A lot of beefs in the music industry are caused from miscommunication and just not really understanding what's going on, having people in your ear saying this is what somebody did, or this is what somebody did to you.
To me, Mozart is our Shakespeare, the one who wrote the most dramatic, psychologically most baffling music. He combined ideas that no one else would have thought of putting together.
I think that there was a fad where everyone said, 'I want you to create a signature step for my artist.' The thing is, for me, music creates the step. The artist commands the step, you know?
One of the problems that we face through the media attention that these artists receive is that there has been an awful lot of talk about opera and classical music being elite and being for an elitist group.
I knew I wanted to be an artist, but I never took music lessons. I was just playing around in front of the mirror and being silly, then suddenly I started making songs.
