Andy Rourke and I had been playing together from 14 or 15, and we had a very great musical chemistry. Andy's just a very respected and unusual musician.
As an artist, I feel so fortunate to be able to learn from all these great musicians that came before me, when some people have nobody that came before them.
When talking about writing, I often use the analogy of archaeology. There are these great tunes all around. Your skill as a musician allows you to pick them out without breaking them.
When we came into the studio I became more and more me, making the tracks and choosing the musicians, partly because a great deal of the time during Bridge, Artie wasn't there.
It was physically difficult, adjusting to wheelchair life, but I remember a great relief and happiness that I was finally getting somewhere, finding musicians to work with that were sympathetic.
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.
I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I'm a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.
Great musicians, you don't just hear them, you feel them. When I listen to Randy Rhoads, I feel every note. I learned a lot from him.
The world must be filled with unsuccessful musical careers like mine, and it's probably a good thing. We don't need a lot of bad musicians filling the air with unnecessary sounds. Some of the professionals are bad enough.
I think I'm an artistic radical, and I think I'll be recognized as one. I'm a really good musician and a songwriter, but I think my real legacy will be as a radical.
I know that I'm capable of moving around on the guitar. I can express myself the way I want to and feel good about it. But as far as technical chops, I'm not a learned musician.
This weird thing that musicians have... it's got something to do with approval, and not feeling good enough, and therefore going out and being great somehow makes your life valid.
The musician - if he be a good one - finds his own perception prompted by the poet's perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music.
The musicians are really on board, they're doing a great job together. There is some kind of a good chemistry, I would say affectionate chemistry and it's a huge promise of success.
I actually started playing in little cafes around New York, and I have a lot of good friends of mine who are musicians who are struggling in New York.
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.
I think there are just a million interviews in anthologies with famous musicians that are about the music, and they're really boring to read.
My father used to tell me about how musicians don't have respect from people and he was afraid about my future.
A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis, that's when cuisine is truly exciting.
The Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame will provide a center where the lives and the artistry of the greatest jazz musicians will be celebrated, and where people will come to learn about jazz, something to which my brother devoted his life's work.
Artists - musicians, painters, writers, poets - always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life.
