I get to work with a lot of great musicians – many I wouldn’t have expected to work with – and see how they form their lives around their music and how they approach it.
I actually love Twitter and Instagram. I do think it’s so strange to think that 20 years ago, people would never have known personal stuff about musicians and actors, but I like it. As long as I don’t obsessively overshare, it’s OK. And when I do overshare, it’s just, like, me saying, ‘I’ve got $7 in my bank account!’
Texas is a hotbed of insanely good bands and musicians.
I think my biggest musical hero growing up was probably Ian MacKaye. He set a great example for all of us local musicians. Still, to this day, I see him as the best example of a right-on musician.
Glenn Hughes is one of the most naturally talented musicians, but he’s still copying Steve Wonder to this day, so I can’t call him a bona fide member of Deep Purple.
I was being ridiculed for going to school… But, you see, I had looked hard at the other musicians and the whole show-business scene… They were doing with jazz musicians what they usually reserved for rock n’ roll cats: making them overnight successes, then overnight antiques.
There are musicians who go through their lives sort of shedding their skins. For me, I’ve always felt backward-compatible to Version 1.0.
I have more fun hanging out with my friends who are musicians and rock stars. You know politicians by and large are pretty stiff, pretty rehearsed.
Working with Benny was important for me and for black musicians in general.
A lot of my friends are struggling musicians. Being a struggling actor, it’s just frustrating because you’re not allowed to do what you want to do.
There’s nothing wrong with becoming a role model, nothing wrong with inspiring people to become musicians, to become actors.
I was able to work with the best musicians in Kansas City starting when I was really young.
There was the best teachers from the Czech Philharmonic, highly dedicated people, some of the best musicians in the world passing on the knowledge about the country, about the principles, and about the music.
It was just music all day… My neighbors were musicians, and my brother and my family and everybody… It was just a musical neighborhood. I think the neighborhood was such a good family type of vibe for me that I didn’t even realize some of the people weren’t my real family till later on in life.
Just because you put super great musicians together, it doesn’t mean you’re going to have that chemistry as a band.
I do not play to musicians. I play to the people.
For me, great jazz records really feel like everyone in the room is playing together in a zone – and all the musicians are completely in sync with each other.
My father was the proprietor of a music shop on Forty-third Street, where many of the finest performers and musicians of the day would come to shop. He knew the classical repertoire inside out.
As for style, there is something about the way musicians dress-they seem to be able to create their own world within their fashion alone.
To not be modest about it, you’ll find that with only a couple of exceptions, most of the musicians that I’ve worked with have done their best work by far with me.
One of the things that I loved about listening to Miles Davis is that Miles always had an instinct for which musicians were great for what situations. He could always pick a band, and that was the thing that separated him from everybody else.
When it comes to musicians, I’m like the daddy of musicians here in Cuba.
Music companies and buyers are not too encouraging towards independent musicians. Everyone wants to play safe and go with established names, but unless one breaks this routine, no new talent will come and survive.
A lot of cats in New Orleans, very soulful, very soulful musicians and they assume that they’re singers. And they just make that assumption. And so when there’s a little intonation problem, people are very forgiving of them because they heard how soulful they play.
There are a lot of musicians in my life. But movies came first for me. That was my original passion.
With ‘Aja,’ there was a sort of happy conjunction between our tastes and the backgrounds and styles of studio musicians at the time.
There are a lot of musicians I’ve met on Twitter where it was like, ‘Hey, I like your music’ – and then I ended up meeting them and it turned into a friendship.
The intensity of being in front of all these incredible musicians and tremendous conductors in these elaborate halls can be overwhelming.
A lot of musicians are good cooks, and a lot of cooks are musicians, but I think that may just be a result of the creative impulse finding several means of expression. Probably an equivalent number are visual artists, woodworkers or compulsive liars.
Musicians are often asked to answer for an entire culture, or for an entire movement. It’s a process of commodification. It becomes packaged and summarized in a word like ’emo’ or ‘grunge’… or ‘folk music.’ I think that’s just language itself, trying to understand the mysteries of the world.
The town I grew up in, there were no musicians to play with; it was just me. The town I grew up in, there was two shops: like, a paper shop that sells confectionery, sweets and stuff, and, like, a farm supplies and a petrol station. That was literally it.
Musicians are in-season all the time.
Although my dad was a doctor, we weren’t necessarily a super-artsy family. We were just a classic, traditional family who got to take a lot of piano lessons and became a bunch of musicians.
Grammy nominations are certainly pleasant, but you can forget about them and lead a perfectly happy life – provided you have the approval of the musicians you work with.
Well there is a lot of work here for younger and older musicians now. Our Ministry of Culture has now really embarked on changing things for artists, and it is getting much better. We just have to organize ourselves as artists, and then things will be better.
As musicians, and as people who sell material for people to hear and absorb, it’s important that we use that voice wisely.
Who you are as a performer is one thing, but when you’re making records, you’re dealing with musicians’ tastes, their goals, their wants, their needs, everyone’s individual pride.
Other musicians are basically personalities who want to make a name for themselves. All I do is sing old songs in the best way I can. What else is there to know? If you were a blacksmith, what would people need to know about you other than whether you can make a good horseshoe?
People don’t understand real musicians anymore. Jack White is great – he’s the real thing – but he isn’t having hits.
We travel so much as touring musicians and artists that sometimes, when you hear a great song that you really think could be on your project, you go ahead and record it instead of try to write it.
THE GODS was my first professional band and I learned a lot during that time. It was very cool playing with so many great musicians as it helped me to learn.
I was lucky enough to first meet Elvis at his house in Bel Air and he used to invite different artists, singers and musicians, to come and jam with him at his house.
Nobody asks me about what male musicians I think about; I only ever get asked about females.
My dad’s side of the family had lots of artists and musicians. There’s an emotional, quite sentimental quality to Slavic culture. It’s very open, it loves art, it loves music, it loves literature. It’s very warm, it’s very up, it’s very down. I would celebrate that.
American musicians are very giving – they have the highest standard in the world – but they are also very demanding in their conditions.
My primary influences were the best jazz players from the 50’s and 60’s and later some of the pop people from the same time period along with the better of the well known blues musicians.
There are a few musicians that I know who seem on the outside like very asocial or somewhat unemotional people, people who aren’t capable of emotions, and people think they’re very cold inside.
If you’re an artist, you want to draw from real life; you want to draw from experiences, emotion, and it’s something that a lot of musicians juggle with. I’ve always found it so fascinating.
With ‘Light,’ I collaborated with a lot of different producers and musicians I respected, and we all wrote and worked on material which I then took to an old-school producer, David Kahne, and we put it all together. The lyrics came first – they were written before the music.
Haute couture is like an orchestra, for which only Balenciaga is the conductor. The rest of us are just musicians, following the directions he gives us.
We’re musicians. We make music for a living. It’s that simple. Nothing else matters.
I love Fun. They’re great guys. They’re incredible artists and musicians.
My dad took me to all the best rock and punk shows when I was growing up and music has always been a part of my life. So I’m very interested in the music scene and I suppose that’s why I’ve ended up going out with musicians. Dave Pirner is still one of my best friends.
Jazz musicians have always taken the standards of their time and performed them with a jazz sensibility.
But recently I began to feel that maybe I wouldn’t be able to do what I want to do and need to do with American musicians, who are imprisoned behind these bars; music’s got these bars and measures you know.
