Top 25 Jackson Browne Quotes

I told my father I wanted to play the banjo, and so he saved the money and got ready to give me a banjo for my next birthday, and between that time and my birthday, I lost interest in the banjo and was playing guitar.

I’d have to say that my favorite thing is writing a song that really says how I feel, what I believe – and it even explains the world to myself better than I knew it.

I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.

I taught myself to play the piano, because I wanted to play it.

I’ve written many extra verses to songs that I learned to sing – an extra verse about a friend, or just add some verse – and that led to writing my own songs.

I never was a very good singer.

I get some heat for what English people call ‘overproduction.’ I don’t think my older stuff was overproduced, but I do think that sound has dated.

That folk music led to learning to play, and making things up led to what turns out to be the most lucrative part of the music business – writing, because you get paid every time that song gets played.

That’s maybe the most important thing each generation does, is to break a lot of rules and make up their own way of doing things.

So I had a couple of years of playing trumpet. I really enjoyed it, but it was not the kind of instrument you could whip out at a party. Let’s face it.

We have an open society. No one will come and take me away for saying what I am saying. But they don’t have to, if they can control how many people hear it. And that’s how they do it.

Musician jokes are a kind of joke that usually have to do with how much money someone makes. Musicians are always starving, so they’re really mean to each other about who makes what.

When I really started liking music was when I could play some of it myself, and after a couple of years of playing folk music, I kinda rediscovered those hits that were on the radio all the time when I was a kid.

I’ve also gotten to play in front of a million people in Central Park when there was a grass roots movement calling for nuclear disarmament – it was about 1982 – they called it Peace Sunday.

Also, right at that particular time in the music business, because of people like the Beatles, people began owning their own publishing. I’ll just say this really quickly – they used to divide the money for the music that was written in two, just equal halves.

The biggest influence? I’ve had several at different times – but the biggest for me was Bob Dylan, who was a guy that came along when I was twelve or thirteen and just changed all the rules about what it meant to write songs.

You can take as much as you can from the generation that has preceded you, but then it’s up to you to make something new.

So what I do, more than play any instrument – I mean, I love to play – but more than that, I write songs. Songs that are about living, about what it’s like to be going through all the things that people go through in life.

Very often it’s really inconvenient – who you fall in love with. You can’t really control it.

Right around the end of the fifties, college students and young people in general, began to realize that this music was almost like a history of our country – this music contained the real history of the people of this country.

I don’t avoid anything. In my songs I just choose to talk about certain things, and so yeah, there are some aspects of my character and personality that don’t come out.

I’m sensitive, you know, about some things, and as some of my partners could attest to, incredibly insensitive.

The idea that I wrote something that stood for the way I feel about things, and that it lasts, that’s probably my favorite thing that I’ve done.

My forays into trying to date girls my own age from the school I went to were all pretty tortured.

People know more about baseball players’ contracts than they do about the policies that govern the fate of our children’s lives in twenty years. Think about it. People used to say, the whole time I was growing up, ‘Do you want to bring a child into this world?’ That’s pretty dire.