Words matter. These are the best Flea Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When you make music, you’re forming these invisible vibrations in the air into different shapes and consistencies and speeds in order to create music, and understanding how the math of that works just gives you more colors to paint with, and allows you to get to what you want quicker.
All I knew about Ethiopia was from a few records that I like, as well as what I read about the famine. But you get there and it’s another world. It’s filled with art and music and poetry and intellectuals and writers – all kinds of people.
I grew up with all these old jazz guys in the ’70s in L.A., and they grew up idolizing Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Lester Young – all of these incredible musicians.
Running opened up something beautiful in my life. I try to send the energy all over my body. I love the feeling of it.
I did record a bunch of stuff, but the thing that usually stops me from doing that is that I’m a terrible singer. I made a bunch of instrumental music, and it feels really good, but just as a singer, I’m not good.
I was on a path that could’ve really led to disaster, and the one thing for me that really kept me focused and gave me something to believe in and a sense of self-worth and a discipline was music.
I wanted to play in a band, and I wanted to do music for a living, and that’s what I dedicated my life to.
Being a dad and being in the Red Hot Chili Peppers and all the stuff I have to do… The trumpet requires a lot of diligence, and I haven’t had the time.
Being a rock star isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, let me tell you.
I’m a performer and have managed to get my performing into the mainstream consciousness of the world, I guess.
Anything worth doing good takes a little chaos.
As a musician I’m about expressing what’s inside, and I think everyone has a song in them that they need to get out, whatever their gig is.
We always write way more than we put on a record. We always write a lot-lot.
I feel like if we’re not running, we’re basically disrespecting our bodies. When you’re running, you’re really using your body for what it’s meant to do.
Music is made up out of these building blocks. Studying how these blocks go together and what they consist of and the math of how it works – it’s all the same stuff; it’s just different aesthetics that we’re talking about.
The Silverlake Conservatory is a nonprofit music school in Los Angeles where we teach music, mostly to kids, but to people of all ages – people who are old, people with beards, all kinds of people.
I’ve always kind of been an in-the-moment kind of person. I don’t think that far in advance or have any idea what’s around the next corner.
About 13-14 years ago, I went back to my alma mater, Fairfax High School, and ran into the music teacher. She invited me to come speak to the kids about the viability of a music career. When I went into the room where I used to play every day in a big orchestra, they had nothing!
I worked full time jobs, basically doing manual labor until I could make enough money supporting myself as a musician.
I got my love of jazz from my stepfather, who was a jazz musician.
Playing music is a beautiful thing. But listening to music is just as great.
The most important thing to me with any politician is that they don’t start wars, but education is a big part of that, too, because educated people are less likely to do stupid, violent things.
Music is like the genius of humankind, universal… People who have never really taken the time to get into music, their lives are a lot smaller. Kids deserve the richness and dimension of it in their lives.
I just lucked into this weird, little obscure cameoesque film career. I just love being a part of film history.
You teach your kids about your beliefs and tell them what you think is right and the conclusions that you’ve come to from living in the world, and then they can make their own decisions.
We were these arty punks from Hollywood. I considered myself an intellectual.
The last thing that should happen is funding cut for education; it should be increased. We need to put more money towards education, and anything else is abusive.
We were at the dark end of the L.A. punk scene, and that scene was full-on and violent and aggressive and wild and intense.
I played trumpet in the school bands. I learned things I liked to play on my trumpet, but I didn’t learn why this note goes with this note and why it produces that sound. Or how to create tension in the composition.
I always thought I was a pretty terrible actor.
When I’m at home, I just run all the time, you know; I get up, and I go pretty much four days a week outdoors. I go in the canyons around L.A., Malibu – just around L.A. there’s a lot of different spots.
When I got with Nina Greenberg, I had been running for a few months already without a trainer. But then she gave me a program and guided me through my runs, showing me how to take care of myself and letting me know I should ice my legs and stretch – stuff I hadn’t been doing.
With acting, I always feel conscious of what I’m doing.
I had a friend who had been teaching music for a long time, and he knew a bunch of teachers, so I just put up the money and started a school.
When I was growing up, in L.A., I went to these schools, Fairfax High School, Bancroft Junior High School, and they had great music departments. I always played in the orchestra, the jazz band, the marching band.
Kids deserve arts, and it’s just as important as science, math, history, English or athletics.
I went to school and studied music for a year at USC, which unlocked a bunch of doors for me in terms of my relationship to music.
Music gave me something that was not only good for me – it gave me something to work on, something to be proud of and something that I really loved and have a love for – but also music was good for other people because you put joy into the world.
My whole musical life has been an educational process, and I’m just furthering my education and filling in the blanks. There’s stuff that I want to know that I don’t know.
It’s fun to just get out there and have a nice conversation when I’m running. To be honest, when I do longer runs, the trail that I like to run up in Malibu has mountain lions, so I always feel I want to run with someone else.
When I was a kid, and it was time to go to college, I thought, ‘College is for people who don’t have the street smarts to make it on their own – get in a band, get in a van, and get rockin’.
Outside of a couple of times I ran without eating right or being too tired, I always feel great after I run.
It’s so easy to fall into a comfortable groove in life where you do the things that you like, and because of that, often times, we don’t grow or change because we’re not pushing ourselves.
Bands develop their own weird ways of doing things.
