I took classical piano for a couple of years, but I sort of lost interest – I couldn’t read a note today if I tried. I still enjoy that stuff, and I think I naturally gravitate towards the classical licks; in fact, I know that I do. I gravitate towards the classical licks that I heard by famous old composers.
I’ve been playing my instrument since I was about three or four. That’s when I started banging around on the piano, trying to be like The Beatles.
I’ve been working on something, just some jazz, relaxed stuff. It will be standard, just piano and voice. It started out as a fun project for me though, I’m still not sure about releasing it.
I always wrote music for my friends, but my focus was on playing piano. I didn’t think I’d be quite good enough to be a soloist, but I believed that if I worked hard enough, I could work as a player, a teacher.
There’s always blood on the carpet when I play Beethoven at the piano. I hate playing the piano! And it’s so hard to fight for Beethoven’s soul! But that’s what I have to do!
When I was eight, my piano teacher played seven or eight notes, and I sang them. She stopped and looked at me in shock! That was the first time I’d gotten that reaction. I’d had looks of horror, but never shock in a positive way.
I own a guitar, a piano, a bass.
I’m not an overly skilled piano player or organ player at all, but I think I’m the right piano and organ player for the Heartbreakers. And I’ve been the right piano and organ player for a lot of sessions that I’ve been called on.
I’m Liberace without a piano.
In my life, my parents wanted me to be a musician, I was supposed to go to Vienna to study piano. But this train wanted to go in another direction.
I actually grew up playing the piano in the church and was deeply involved in music ministry.
I’m not particularly good at anything. I’m not an incredible guitarist or piano player or songwriter. I think what I do is, when I notice someone is really good at something, I try to get that out of them.
I ended up taking piano lessons at a really young age, I took, like, years of piano lessons, and I always loved to sing.
See my father knew a lot about music, he played the piano and he would do theory and stuff like that, but I didn’t learn anything from him, but I played that for him and he liked it a lot.
After the Second World War, I returned to California to study composition with Darius Milhaud, who wrote wonderful works like ‘Le Boeuf sur le Toit’ and ‘La Cretion du Monde.’ I especially enjoy his work for two pianos, ‘Scaramouche.’
When I was five years old, my parents gave me a drum set for Christmas. My mom played the piano, and Dad played the saxophone badly. But that Christmas morning, I remember we all played together, and I thought it was the greatest day ever.
Dad would come home from doing odd jobs, and sometimes he’d come home late at night with lumber, and he’d rumble around with all this wood in our small place. We’d finish putting it away, and then we’d play that piano. I’ll be eternally grateful to him.
I had a very strong interest in music, specifically the piano from a very small age.
I asked for a piano in the TARDIS, but it hasn’t happened. I’d love to see the Doctor rock up and play, but it’d have to be done in an inventive and silly way.
Mom and sister played piano growing up; my grandma still plays piano in church. They always beat me over the head trying to get me to play piano, but I was more interested in riding dirt bikes and playing in the mud.
Fingers don’t have much to do with playing the piano. The idea that they do must be unlearned.
To me, the piano in itself is an orchestra.
Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn’t have anything to do with me, but it’s just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.
I was half asleep lying there writing this lyric in my head at about 3:30 in the morning. I woke Steve up with this idea and then we went into the living room where there was a little upright piano and finished the song. I wonder where that piano is now?
I was doing theater in my high school, and I started writing sort of silly songs on the piano backstage in summer theater. I eventually put them online and started getting this little following.
My grandmother played the piano, and I used to toddle over there and pick out little things that sounded good to me.
I often think of random melodies. And I pretty much hear in my head what I want to do with the orchestra as I’m writing on the piano.
Claude Debussy’s ‘Children’s Corner’ is a suite with six movements just for piano. Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli and Alfred Cartot’s versions are amazing, but my favorite is Menininha Lobo’s. Her version was done when she was an old lady – and you can hear it.
But if you listen to great piano players, both classical and jazz, there’s a huge range of dynamics and colors and emotional expression that’s possible with the instrument.
My audition song is, and has been since 1977, ‘I Love a Piano.’
When I was a little girl my parents always told me do everything you want in an artistic way. If you want to draw, make a drawing. Just do it. And if you want to play piano, play piano. It was a very free childhood where everything was possible.
I’ve always written songs. I’d come home from school and play piano for hours on end, just banging around.
I play the piano and have been playing since I was 7, mainly classical Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart.
I actually write more on guitar than I do on piano.
I’d like to be a piano player.
I started playing guitar when I was eight. Well, I started piano and really liked it but never practiced, but it taught me how to read music, and then my mom signed me up for guitar lessons, and I connected to that way more.
I’ve been into music for a long time. I started playing drums when I was 8 and piano when I was 10, then bass and guitar when I was 18.
Here I am, a not over-good business man, a second-rate engineer. I can make poor mechanical drawings. I play the piano after a fashion. In fact, I am one of those proverbial Jack-of-all-trades who are usually failures. Why I am not, I can’t tell you.
If I weren’t musical, then I would have just published a book, you know? But I’m lucky enough to play piano, and so I use piano to convert my poems.
Bud Powell’s probably the biggest influence on my piano playing.
There are two places where I can completely relax: in nature and by the piano.
I found it quite pleasing to be alone from a very young age. The piano became my source of release.
As an introverted kid who lived in the middle of nowhere, my stories made up the whole of my social life. That meant that while other kids cultivated hobbies like skateboarding or playing the piano, I sat at home scribbling in notebooks.
I was very quick; I did nothing but play the piano apart from being at school. I was at home with my mother, saying, ‘Go out and get some fresh air.’ No, I wanted to play the piano all the time I could. I was completely obsessed.
If you can’t play it on an acoustic guitar or a grand piano then it’s not a song.
My hobbies are playing piano and guitar, pining for girls, worrying about climate change, pining for girls, and the poetry of John Keats.
Well, my piano’s really beautiful. I actually have two pianos. I have a Yamaha upright from the ’60s that’s blond, wood, and black, and I also have one from the ’20s from Chicago – not a well-known brand or anything.
In my world, before I knew about Eddie Van Halen, I was playing piano, and at that point in my teenage life, I thought he was just a guitar player.
I played with Prince in 2010… the America tour. The one with Misty Copeland dancing on top of the piano! But Prince played the piano on that song. But I played two dates with him on that tour. When we played the gig, every couple of songs, Prince would change his clothes.
The Goth character was a difficult thing to get my head round. I’m not really a fan of Goth music. I’m more a piano and guitar man – that’s what I love.
For a while, I was working on transcribing rap lyrics and then converting them into rhythmic patterns on the piano. And so in my mind, when I was taking a solo, I would be saying the lyrics and trying to play actual notes to their rhythms. Now, the influence just comes in and out in my playing.
My progress on the piano and my motivation to practice increased dramatically when I caught a vision of my potential.
Now, when I play soul piano, for instance, and I play a rendition of ‘Spain,’ I do it deconstructively. That’s the most fun, but I can only do that when I’m on my own.
The process is always the same. I get an inspiration for a new song, I put it down on paper immediately so I won’t lose it. When I am ready to go to the studio with it, I play it a few times on the piano and edit, add, and type the lyrics and take it to the studio. Sometimes I don’t have anything on paper.
When I was very small, the electricity was turned off because we didn’t pay the bill. I remember sitting by the oil lamp listening to my mother playing ‘Careless Love’ on the piano.
I can sit down at the piano and make you think I know how to play the piano because I know, like, the beginnings of four songs.
I was born on September 30, 1939, in Rosheim, a small medieval city of Alsace in France. My father, Pierre Lehn, then a baker, was very interested in music, played the piano and the organ, and became, later, having given up the bakery, the organist of the city. My mother Marie kept the house and the shop.
