I was fifteen years old, and I hardly knew how to play a simple Bach prelude on the piano when I began to compose music, and at the most advanced level. I had never studied such things as harmony.
My tastes in music tend to favor anything my kids don't like, out of natural antipathy amplified by a sort of malicious glee.
I started performing very young as a salsa dancer, and every time I was on that stage dancing, all I knew was that I wanted to speak. I wanted the music to stop, and I wanted to speak.
I'm tired of being considered vapid for liking pop music or caring about fashion as if these things inherently lack substance or as if the things I enjoy somehow make me a lesser person.
You rarely find someone who sings really well and who produces really well; it's a problem, and I just think it's a missing link in the music scene.
I go into military communities and do fundraisers and that kind of thing with the band, because I know that the music can help do a lot of things. It can bring communities together, it can raise awareness... and it entertains.
We lived on a farm in the English countryside, where we wrote a lot of our music. You really were treated like an artist during those days-not like product, which is now the mode.
That would be awesome, to be totally making records whenever I want and to play a show and have a few hundred thousand people there at any city you go to because people know you and your music.
I think music can heal your soul if you'll let it. It can also bring you up if you're down. It can also bring you down if you're too up. It's a mood thing.
We have been working with Habitat for Humanity and we have built eighty homes, 80% of which are being lived in by New Orleans' musicians. It is called the Musicians' Village and at the center is the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music.
When I'm on tour, I'm in a new city every single night, and the energy and the crowds and the kids and the screaming and them knowing every single word of my music and being onstage is such an energetic feeling with a big payoff.
Before I wasn't sure what I wanted to say, but now, I have had so many different experiences that they have given me what I want to get across in my music.
Uhm, I'm the one wanting the lessons! I don't want to say too much about it because I'd rather have you see the movie, but he's trying to find his music.
Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).
My audience is the baby-boomers, the bulk of the population. This is also a group that is being ignored by most record companies because they're not the Top 40 hit singles market. They forget these people still listen to music.
I don't have a crystal ball, but I'm willing to bet one of my arms right now that as long as there's electricity, Ramones music is going to be relevant.
Lou Reed's music has been in the lives of millions of people all over the world for decades. He had a truly universal presence and was respected by musicians across all genres.
Trying to write music, be in a band and keep it all happening is one of the hardest, morale-destroying, heartbreaking things you will ever try to do - and that's when it's going well.
For music, unlike a $500 software program, people are paying a buck or two a song, and it's those dollars and pennies that have to add up to pay for not just the cost of that song, but the investment in the next song.
Doesn't anyone here think this sounds like a vision of hell? While we are all competing or dying, when will there be time for sex or music or books? Stop the world, I want to get off.
There's this idea of a star, and this person is very aloof and writes all the music, and they don't talk to anyone unless they go through the record label. And I always felt very uncomfortable about that.
