Top 35 Phil Anselmo Quotes

There it is again. Image. Once again. I get really tired of it quick.

I wake up, and I’ll just start reading and trying to brace myself for the rest of the day, and all the while I’m doing that, I’m kicking myself mentally.

You gotta look beyond the mainstream… the mainstream’ll drown you, you know? There’s always a pulse in the underground that I love. And the pulse in the underground is what keeps heavy metal alive.

There’s always something going on, but thank goodness these days it’s with a clear head, which helps me massively.

You’re always going to have detractors, and you’re always going to have people who love you, and that’s how it’s perfectly balanced and the world spins on.

I tried to take heavy metal… and balled it up and chopped it in half and really tried to create a new form of energy. I really tried to re-shape extreme music as I see it through my eyes.

The success that Pantera had, I could have never, ever forecasted or predicted, and I always felt a responsibility to try to pay even a bit of it forward.

I’m glowing in the dark with my studio tan. I’ve been in a cave of music for months and months and months.

It seems like if you are not painted up special way or have some tailor made outfit to put on to go out on stage… I don’t know… there’s too much of it out there.

Music is there for us to explore. To intentionally limit yourself to one, two, or three genres is limitation at its worst. Music is huge; it’s a gigantic history lesson, and if you are true music fan or a musician, you should explore it. It’s all right there in front of us.

I’ve always said that Pantera fans were the best in the world, and I truly meant that, and I still mean it.

I love music. I love every kind of extreme sort of music, and many different genres, and if I were to have to dedicate myself to just one kind of genre, I would feel kind of gypped. I’d be like, man, I wish I could do this or that. And really all it takes is trying it out.

The lead guitar work is a bit repetitious, but when a song is under two minutes long, I don’t have much room anyway. Thank goodness. But I’ve always contributed guitar parts to every band I’ve ever been in, so I’ll always play the axe.

Honestly, I got the best of both worlds: groove of New Orleans meets the intensity of Texas. That’s the best education I could have, the best experiences I could have.

I love the Beatles, and when I was very young, I had young parents, so Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles constantly were big influences on my life.

I can easily say I’ve done everything I’ve wanted in music.

In my better sense of mind, I know that I’m far from alone and far from the worst, and the earth keeps spinning. Everything keeps moving, with or without me.

We definitely have a hardcore following.

I think anyone who suffers from chronic pain can agree with this – you feel this great significance. What I wanted to capture was that significance, and as a matter of fact I think that’s one of the lyrics on ‘Conflict,’ on the split. I touch on the significance, and really it’s a selfish thing, in an offbeat way.

I love to play guitar. I’ve been writing my own songs on the axe since I was nine years old. I suck at leads.

You can only exist as far as your mind will allow you to exist, and I think chronic pain will stop time dead in its tracks. You feel like you’re the only one, and how unfair it is, and a million different feel-sorry-for-yourself type feelings.

I think Pantera is a type of band that has been documented very, very well over the years. With the past re-releases, we were fortunate enough to have old demos and stuff that never really saw the light of day. But Pantera was not the type of band to waste many riffs or many parts or songs.

I guess I’ve never been introduced properly to Pink Floyd. I know they’re great, don’t get me wrong. Excellent, excellent musicians; great band; awesome harmony; great song writers; I just don’t know anything besides, I guess, the popular songs on the radio.

Everyone’s gonna have their opinion, everyone’s gonna have their favorite bands. The best way I can describe it is music is like food, either you love it, hate it, or are indifferent about it. Or you grow up and acquire a taste for it.

There has got to be a lot of unreleased video out there, live footage and whatnot. There’s always going to be something extra for the Pantera fan.

I am the type that cannot stay put in living in the past and solely in the past. It’s not healthy and it doesn’t feel right.

You have certain expressions when you write music, a lot of different emotions, a lot of different feelings.

Creating any type of art is all about mood. I’ve been making extreme music in one fashion or another for decades. And truthfully, Down has a big enough fan base to where I could remain content to do only that, but music is a vast territory and I am an explorer. And I’m a lover of all things considered extreme in music.

I’m a bad pessimist. I don’t think about how successful any record I’ve ever done is going to do before it came out.

People are going to think and take things how they’re going to take it, and I have no control over that, so it’s kind of like biding time until you get your feedback. So, it’s like, once the public can consume what you’re putting out there, then you know. Then you know hit, miss, in between.

Pantera revolutionized the sound and the approach to heavy metal. It’s been regurgitated. Once you up the production on a product and not just the playing but the actual production, then it’s going to up the ante.

I went from being a kid-kid, listen to everything from The Beatles through Kiss, Peter Frampton, Jethro Tull classic rock, classic stuff into immediately, it seemed like, Iron Maiden and stuff like that. The first Iron Maiden record and then, obviously, the first Metallica record.

This is the band I always wanted to be in.

I’ve heard too many times where people say that I’m this ultra-serious guy. In truth, I’ve got an extremely absurd sense of humor. I thrive on the absurd – I love it.

I wasn’t that wild about that. I told them basically if they were really going to want to bring back heavy metal to a program on MTV, then they are really going to have to get in touch with what real heavy metal is.