Inspiring music may fill the soul with heavenly thoughts, move one to righteous action, or speak peace to the soul.
When I listen to music from different eras, I sense different things. The 1940s music, there's so much optimism and romance, maybe because they just solved the biggest problem on Earth at that time - World War II. In the 1960s, there was so much crea...
I used to play the piano by listening to it - like Chopin pieces, when I was, like, a little kid - and then the minute my parents got me lessons to read music, I couldn't do it anymore.
At a party in L.A., I met this middle-aged gentleman who I was talking to for ages when I asked, 'So, what do you do?' Turns out I was speaking to legendary music producer Quincy Jones, who worked on Michael Jackson's hits. And there was little old m...
Well when I was young, when I was very young, when I was a little boy I don't remember the music I heard, but there was an article in the Brooklyn Daily written by my Aunt about how I could choose phonograph records.
In any case, Ives encouraged me to go into music even though he himself had such a hard time being a composer.
It was only later on that I became more interested in older music.
These wealthy people were very interested in contemporary music. They wanted to help diffuse it and get it to be known to other people.
Then, when the Depression came, all of this changed completely. Since that time, the entire public is of a very different sort and there was not so much support for contemporary music in a direct way.
Since I'm allergic to various things, the army wouldn't accept me during the war, and I got into the Office of War Information, which sent music to Europe.
Aaron Copland was a man that had a very specific point of view about what music should be which was that, he felt that new music should have the composer should show a personality in his music.
I've been lucky to listen to lots of different types of music.
These are the sort of things that push you on in music - the curiosity, a passion for new ideas.
Well, I've had a lot of different experiences in music over the years. And not everything you do can satisfy everybody's idealised version of you.
I believe that music is connected by human passions and curiosities rather than by marketing strategies.
I don't think I was ever particularly mean. I can certainly think of some idiotic exchanges I've had. I was accused of destroying pop music, like Wagner destroyed opera - a guy in Germany started ranting that at me.
And obviously, when I started out, I had a little bit more curiosity than some, and went seeking out the original artists, or in some cases searching up country music.
We're all just animals. That's all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That's where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels.
The Internet is overrated. It's much smaller an innovation than people think it is. I don't think it's changed the way anybody makes music.
It's what I do. I don't deserve any awards for this, it's just music. It's just writing songs. You sit down, you write a song, you record it. You tour and play the songs live, dress them up a bit differently, or dress them down.
Obviously the people that I admired, like the Beatles, were really into rock'n'roll, but it was already a little past rock'n'roll when I started listening and making my own choices about music.
