With the White Stripes we were trying to trick people into not realising we were playing the blues. We did not want to come off like white kids trying to play black music from 100 years ago so a great way to distract them was by dressing in red, whit...
I started off as a rapper from Thunder Bay, Ontario, believe it or not. There was a little group of 10 or 12 of us that would get together and copy each other's cassettes. So I was a rapper first, and it was that music that got me into this great ent...
In my childhood there was every year at my old home, Roxborough, or, as it is called in Irish, Cregroostha, a great sheep-shearing that lasted many days. On the last evening there was always a dance for the shearers and their helpers, and two pipers ...
If people are talking about you, that's great. You start making more money, that's great. You get to go to weird places, that's great. The music industry is weird, especially with the Internet. People are calling you all kinds of weird stuff, like 'j...
I'm not a great guitarist, but I do bits and bobs. I'm mainly a songwriter and a composer. I've done a lot of scoring and some stuff for British pop music that did pretty well, but I've mainly been working on my own stuff with Duncan Sheik.
We teach young kids from 8 to 14 or 15 about their musical heritage through great songs written by American songwriters. We don't do too many modern composers, although we include songs from Billy Joel and other writers like him.
I may have a little bit of a talent for music, but I've learnt to tap into my own self when I write. When I put the drill bit inside my heart, sometimes I come up with something light and frothy, sometimes with something deep and painful, but it's gr...
As a kid, I'd watch MTV and think how great it would be to have my own music videos on those shows. Now I turn on MTV and, along the bottom of the screen, it often reads, 'Coming next... Pixie Lott.' That's so strange that I can't even begin to make ...
My mother wasn't rich, and I never seen my father. I was a street performer. I've been shot. And now I'm known around the world, and I've touched a lot of people with my music. That's one of the great testimonies that's gonna go down in history.
I'm not a great deductive thinker, but I will admit to having competence in a very wide range of things - not being afraid to try to write about baseball, choral music and dinosaurs in the same week and see connections among them.
It's great, the number of people that I'm reaching through the Internet - I've done some wonderful interviews - but I miss touching the bodies. I miss shaking hands, looking into people's faces and saying, 'Hello, how are you doing? Thank you for pla...
I never feel like I need to make a song that sells 5 million copies; that's not the point of why I make music. It's great if that happens, like it did with 'Clarity,' but my goal is to always make a better track than the last one.
From early on there were two things that filled my life - music and storytelling, both of them provoked by my father. He was a jazz pianist and also a very good storyteller, an avid reader. He passed both those interests on to me.
I love to get to that place where I don't know what kind of music I'm doing; I don't know if it's any good. I don't know if it's anything. It's a big question mark. The idea is to have interesting results. That's my bottom line.
In high school, I decided I wanted to learn guitar, so I picked it up and starting teaching myself some basic chords and started playing with friends. Guitar inherently lends itself to be guitar music, especially when you're not good at guitar.
I'm not a pretty princess, and I'm aware of that, so I like music that is really intense, really bold, and characters that in a way almost have a dark side and are kind of evil because, for me, that's when I feel my strongest and fiercest, when I'm n...
You can't listen to what people who aren't musical have to say. When Anytime was released, I had bad reviews, and at first I was hurt. Your songs are like your children. You don't want to hear, 'Your kid is ugly.' But I knew the record was good and i...
When it all started, record companies - and there were many of them, and this was a good thing - were run by people who loved records, people like Ahmet Ertegun, who ran Atlantic Records, who were record collectors. They got in it because they loved ...
We start a lot with melodies and instrumentation and trying to figure out good melodies for verses and choruses. We get to lyrics sometimes second, so we'll start humming a melody, finding something, and see where the music takes you as far as lyrics...
I turned on VH1 this morning just to get a little warm-up before I came over here, and I think it's just terrific. There's so much great stuff: diverse and wonderful music, good performances, great looking girls, great videos, the whole thing.
Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work.
