Music is a kind of magical thing, and you can’t make magic every time, but you try. Every once in a while it has that magic, and the audience knows that. I probably miss it more than I hit it, but I think that’s what all musicians try for.
What people really should be able to be confident in is that the standards of music- making that classically trained musicians present is elite, it is the best and all of us as artists should be committed to that.
I have to continue to make the older musicians proud and brush up on my skills.
I’m just fortunate to get to sing songs composed by such great musicians. It’s a bonus that the songs have been received well.
People don’t want their actors acting like musicians.
Both my grandfathers and my mother’s brother were musicians.
All musicians start out with ideals but hanging on to them in the face of media scrutiny takes real integrity. Tougher still is to live up to the ideals of your dedicated fans.
I had a lot of older musicians looking out for me, teaching me, and showing me things when they saw how interested I was in music from a young age. They would take me to the side and just play some things in my ear, and I would try to play it back to them.
I get asked, ‘Who would you really like to work with?’ I’m already working with them. Smart, talented, funny people, good musicians, an extended family, good friends.
Musicians always come off sounding a little bit pretentious, and a little bit… I don’t know, hypocritical, from what they do, talking about strong issues.
It was about working with other musicians, but more than that it’s about exploring musical areas that you could never do with the band you’re in, in my case Judas Priest. You could tackle musical areas and lyrical areas that wouldn’t be appropriate for Priest.
I think the musicians I play with solo do a certain thing that the musicians we play with with the Indigo Girls don’t do. It’s just a different thing. And it sort of steers my writing in some ways.
Artists – musicians, painters, writers, poets – always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life.
When I’m not working, I don’t mix with actors, really. I have about two or three friends from theater school, and we call each other and meet. But in the main, no. I’m more happy with musicians or horse riders or sailors.
For musicians, Musikfest is the most cool event.
When we came into the studio I became more and more me, making the tracks and choosing the musicians, partly because a great deal of the time during Bridge, Artie wasn’t there.
I believe in monstrosities, and ‘I Am Abraham’ is a monstrosity of sorts, raveling out moment by moment with its contrapuntal songs, as if a band of musicians were at play, all of them with Lincoln’s beard and disturbing grey eyes.
If you’re going to use standards as criteria for signing musicians, you can sign thousands. If you’re going to use some sort of conceptual interpretation that’s based on the tradition of those standards, but is trying to move away from it, you’re down to about 10 people or so.
We have such a high drop-out rate from musicians, said the head of the college. He was right – I dropped out before I even dropped in. Months later they were still asking what had happened to me, not realising that I was on a UK tour.
I feel albino musicians could neutralise all the racial problems.
I meet many people, I talk with them, like a TV show host. I show what’s going on with Greenpeace, interesing political things, I have artists, musicians and bands.
I’d been watching documentaries about early rock where white artists took ‘race records’ from blues and soul musicians to achieve mass appeal. I wanted to flip that and do an EP covering only white artists.
Apple Music is trying to create an entire pop culture experience that includes audio and video. If South Park walks into my office, I’m not going to say, ‘You’re not musicians.’ We’re going to do whatever hits pop culture smack on the nose.
I couldn’t get session work because most musicians hated my style.
We’re all players and musicians and we sure all get along good. We just clicked right off the bat. We started playing and then we almost immediately started recording.
I mean, I could just go round and use session musicians for every song, but I don’t find that helps when it comes to setting up a band for live. Derrick has been with me for donkey’s years.
But an innovation, to grow organically from within, has to be based on an intact tradition, so our idea is to bring together musicians who represent all these traditions, in workshops, festivals, and concerts, to see how we can connect with each other in music.
Under Thatcher, who ruled us with an iron rod, great art was made. Amazing designers and musicians. Acid house was born. Very colourful and progressive.
When I came to New York after high school in 1959 and started to meet musicians, ‘Hot House’ was like a standard jam session tune.
Success breeds volume, and it’s just amazing how many young writers, artists, and musicians there are in town.
In the same way that musicians inspire me, artists and photographers like David LaChapelle influence me with their visuals. A photographer like LaChapelle creates an entirely new and unique visual for their work, and that’s what I’d like to do with the Charli XCX world as well.
I don’t control it at all. It’s all up to the musicians in the group. They control it. They make all the cues, and they tell me what they want, and then I act like a mirroring device so that everyone can see what the cues are.
I did a concert… in September with the Berlin Philharmonic… They’re great musicians, and there’s always something to learn from them.
I’m not going to ask musicians to sit there and pretend to play. It feels insulting to the musicians to me.
There are only so many letters in the alphabet. When I talk to young musicians or authors and they ask for advice, I say, ‘You gotta learn all the letters of your own personal alphabet. With music, you need to know all the different kinds of music and everything in and around your given instrument.’
Musicians from the beginning of time have been there to express the mood and the musical feelings in the air for whatever’s going on in that particular culture. It’s the greatest joy as a musician to be able to translate that, be part of something and watch the scenery around you.
For some reason I can’t explain, artist and musicians tend to look younger than our age. Being in music, you need this youthful sense of discovery and wonder for what you’re doing and keep your imagination open. That’s a youthful way of looking at life and I think that reflects in how you age.
It bothers me when musicians listen to music from the ’60s and try and recreate it. Those people weren’t trying to recreate music from the ’20s. Why do it?
Many of our greatest musicians abandoned all of their aesthetic objectives to try to become pertinent. And, at the end of the day, they never became pop stars. I counter stated that very strongly, and I continue to do that.
I’m very proud of my band and my musicians.
Musicians are also interpretive artists and we are just as creative as painters and writers. We interpret in a way that expresses ourselves.
Writers and musicians are very similar in that the chances of making a life in either field are so infinitesimal. And once you’re in, the chances of staying viable are difficult. But there is something incredibly different about performing in front of a live audience, as opposed to sitting at your desk typing.
Mum left school at 15, and after a few years of modelling and dating jazz musicians, was married by 21 to my father, Mike Taylor, a journalist on the ‘Daily Mirror.’ They had my brother and me pretty quickly and had split up by the time I was two. I don’t really have any memories of them as a couple.
Miles Davis would have this lineup of all these amazing musicians and one day would just say, ‘We’re done.’ After tons of great records and tickets sold, he said, ‘Now I’m going to grow my hair out and play my horn through a wah-wah pedal.’ Rather than play it safe, he went on.
Artists and musicians of the Sixties were definitely into clothes.
I’m in awe of people like Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard; they’re great musicians and people. But I’m most starstruck by people in the small town where I live. Especially single dads, like me, who are working five times as hard to raise their kids.
That’s the thing about musicians: The priority is to create something new that’s never been before. And you put your life on the line every time that you play.
It’s funny, when bands or younger musicians ask me: ‘So, what does it take to make it?’ Well, first explain to me what you mean by ‘making it’: Do you want to be a rock star or do you want music to be your livelihood?
These people are artists. These people are musicians. They’re taking it out and trying to express it that way.
MTV in general is involved with so many artists – musicians, actors, people in the fashion industry, and art world.
‘New Jack City’ was a perfect marriage of music and film. They used a lot of musicians: myself, Christopher Williams. People that were popular because of their music were given the chance to act. And the soundtrack was incredible.
