The great thing about the arts, and especially popular music, is that it really does cut across genres and races and classes.
A lot of political music to me can be rather pedantic and corny, and when it's done right - like Bruce Springsteen or Jackson Browne or great satire from Randy Newman, there's nothing better.
There were so many great music and political scenes going on in the late '60s in Cambridge. The ratio of guys to girls at Harvard was four to one, so all of those things were playing in my mind.
The E Street band casts a pretty wide net. Our influences go all the way back to the early primitive garage music, and also, we've had everything in the band from jazz players to Kansas City trumpet players to Nils Lofgren, one of the great rock guit...
I've never really been a traditional country kind of guy. I wanted my music to sound more like the end of the '90s and to have the kind of great music, pop or whatever, that radio will embrace.
Great music is its own movie, already. And the challenge, as a music fan, is to keep the song as powerful as it wants to be, to not tamper with it and to somehow give it a home.
I would say, from an all-around point of view, Bruce Springsteen is one of the two great poet lords of America, Bob Dylan, coming out of the music world, the two of them.
When I did 'Bird,' it was a surprise to some people, first because I wasn't in it and second because most of the films I'd been doing were cop movies or westerns or adventure films, so to be doing one about Charlie Parker, who was a great influence o...
My advice is: if you've got to be miserable to write great music, then drive a truck.
For me, that's always been one of the great charms of the first person: we gain access to a very personal, private kind of music.
FKA Twigs is stunning. She has beautiful contemporary and unique sound with an almost psychedelic vibe. Her music is great for the runway.
I don't care about the charts; I just want to make great music that I enjoy performing on stage and I'm proud of.
It's very strange when people get so focused on what a song means, what actual events inspired a song. That gets people really excited for some reason... But that's what's great about music - however people interpret it, whatever they see, is what I ...
More than anything, I realize I've been blessed to make great music.
Every day, you have to make three hours of music, just randomly improvising, and that's a great way to weed stuff out.
Man I mean, the great thing about playing clubs in Harlem is people have an appreciation not just for the music but for the history of the music.
Ry Cooder for me is a master, a great master that has a wonderful feel for Cuban music. He's also paid tribute my talent a bit, even though I don't know half of what he knows.
I always tell the fans, 'Screw it! Like what you like. Listen to what you want.' Insisting that one type of music is better than the next is snobbery, and I have no time for that. Check out all the music that's out there. There's great stuff you're p...
I think pop music is a great place to get new ideas across.
While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.
You can have great sequences with music, but if you don't have the acting you're bored after 15 minutes. Or not bored, but you're like, 'So what?'
