When you sit down and write a song, you kind of have the idea for the song, and you sit there at the piano and you kinda just write it. And then of course later there’s some dinking around with it and changing some stuff.
I love doing music, and I plan to do it until I die or as long as I can walk to the piano.
I play piano all the time. I’m always at my piano, playing music.
I get twitchy if I don’t pick up a guitar or sit at the piano every now and then… I have to do it; I don’t have a choice.
I think it would be better if nobody owned anything, but they didn’t starve. Had enough paint and enough pianos and everything else.
Well, my sister played trumpet. Can you imagine having a sister blowing the trumpet around the house, Fred? And my brother, he played piano. Everybody was playing some kind of music, so it was natural for me to get into it.
I mean, give me a guitar, give me a piano, give me a broom and string, I wouldn’t get bored anywhere.
I wanted to play piano, and that slid quickly into writing – it wasn’t enough to play other people’s notes: I had to write notes too.
Some people play the piano, some do Sudoku, some watch television, some people go out to dinner parties. I write books.
It’s different for every song. But for ‘Say Something,’ I think it was Chad who had an idea on guitar, and I had an idea on piano for different songs, and we just married them together. We bounce things off each other constantly and kind of massage all these ideas into a three and a half minute pop song.
I started playing the piano when I was about two and got a scholarship to the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore when I was five. But I left when I was 11.
A female piano player is always pretty cool to me.
I also like the banging piano – that old good-time piano.
My father’s Alfred Newman – born in 1900, child prodigy at the piano, ended up in pit orchestras in the teens. I think he’s one of the youngest conductors to conduct Broadway and worked with George Gershwin and Jerome Kern and Cole Porter – went out with Irvin Berlin in 1930 to Hollywood and never left.
There must be so many people who have various artistic talents that, for whatever reason, just have no way of expressing them. Either they have no support from their family or they live in a part of the world, maybe they’ve never heard a piano or seen a piano.
I am so in the past. I’m such a Luddite when it comes to making music. All I can do is write at the piano.
I remember learning how to play ‘The Fool On The Hill’ on piano when I was in maybe fifth grade.
I started playing piano when I was 6, ukulele at 7.
Chopin, Schubert, and Liszt had no idea of how to write for the piano.
If it’s fast, no I don’t have enough piano technique. In that case, it’s probably been done on some kind of synthesizer or sequencer. Then the score can then be printed out and so forth.
I didn’t get into the music business because somebody made me take piano lessons, you know. I got into music because I was a natural writer and had a lot of curiosity about sound.
My mother played piano so we always had music around the house.
I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music – Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering ‘The Lost Chord’ on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn.
I always feel like I want to write a song when I’m really upset. And when I’m in an argument with my family, I go straight to the piano and just kind of take it out on the piano and get all emotional.
When I was young, I wanted to be a writer or painter. I was always writing stories, and I excelled at drawing. My teachers encouraged my art work. When I was 9 or 10, I began learning piano and started writing music.
The piano has disappeared from working-class family life, which is a shame. It’s associated with the middle classes now. Everyone in my family sang and played piano, but my parents were delighted and amazed when I became the first professional performer in the family – apart from a clog-dancer way back.
Yes, there were piano bands and great rock pianists, from Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard to Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman, and Elton John. But something about the electric guitar speaks of more than music – it epitomizes and gives voice to the rebellion, power, and sexuality of rock.
Piano is unique in that way: it can be both percussive and haunting.
I had studied piano since I was 13, but I was surrounded by students who’d been playing since they were 5. I realized I was never going to be anything but mediocre.
Century-old records are the closest thing we have to a time machine. To listen to the voice of Theodore Roosevelt or the piano playing of Claude Debussy is to feel the years falling away like autumn leaves from a maple tree.
I wouldn’t be able to act like Al Pacino or play the piano like Dr. John, But I could probably act better than Dr. John and play the piano better than Al Pacino.
I love to sing and play the piano. As a child, I’ve always loved to sing my heart out, and even my teachers encouraged me to take up singing.
I started writing songs when I was real young, when I was 3 years old. The piano spoke to me – I don’t remember when I wasn’t playing piano. My second grade talent show was the first time I performed my own thing. I dressed up as Dracula and played a song called ‘Monster Rock’ that I wrote. And I won.
My grandmother was a classical pianist, so I grew up with Schubert, Mozart, Beethoven. I studied piano as a kid. My musical background and upbringing was very much a mix.
Music has always been in my family, but it was mainly keyboards. I learned to play classical piano, but when I first heard the amazing bass guitar of James Jamerson, who played on all the big Motown hits of the ’60s and ’70s, I knew bass guitar was my instrument.
One of the great regrets of my life is that I don’t play piano.
To learn a piece on the piano – even a simple one – has proved every bit as agonizing as writing a chapter in a book, every bit as tedious and hopeless and halting. But this is not to say that the piano hasn’t helped my writing. It has, just not in the ways I expected.
Oddly, when I started to make the record, I wasn’t aware I was making a record. I just was sort of disgusted with the whole thing and sequestered myself in the basement and started playing the piano just for something to do.
When I was 5 or 6, I was messing around with the piano, and I listened to everything from Chopin to boogie-woogie.
I have two extraordinary daughters, who, I can say proudly, are doing very well in school and in piano. Daughters are a father’s joy.
In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity.
I studied piano for many years, and I still play. I’m a complete amateur, and I wouldn’t consider myself very good at all, but I enjoy it.
Fundamentally I feel that there is as much difference between the stage and the films as between a piano and a violin. Normally you can’t become a virtuoso in both.
Music is like nuclear plants. In a way, it’s true! Music is totally artificial. Still using some material from nature, a piano is assembled with wood and iron. Nuclear power uses material from nature, but it’s been manipulated by humans, and it produces something unnatural.
I usually write my music on a piano, and I really enjoy performing that way, because that actually shows how the music was in my mind before it actually became an electronic song.
I identify more as a musician than as a singer, because I play piano and percussion, and I engineer and produce everything that I do.
Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.
I tend to be freer on the piano. I never took guitar lessons, so my reach exceeds my grasp – what I hear in my head I don’t always know how to play. But I love to play over something else. I’m not a self-starter. I get kind of bored with the same three folk chords that I know.
I had piano lessons when I was five or six years old, so my mom got me this little keyboard in my room. And then it progressed from that to classical guitar and drums and oboe.
I started off as a kid singing with my dad. My dad was my best pal. But he had seven kids, and I was the only one who was kind of interested in what he was playing and singing at the piano. And he was not only my dad, but he was my best pal, and I was interested in doing whatever he wanted to.
Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.
The piano is the X factor. People have a tough time following the structures when there’s no piano there, spelling it out. It makes it more easily understood, particularly to people who don’t know as much about music.
I was always a happy kid. I’d play the piano fairly well. I did all sorts of things fairly well. But who the hell wants to be happy all the time? It’s a miserable state to be in permanently. Can you imagine how dreary that would be?
I think my first experience of art, or the joy in making art, was playing the horn at some high-school dance or bar mitzvah or wedding, looking at a roomful of people moving their bodies around in time to what I was doing. There was a piano player, a bass player, a drummer, and my breath making the melody.
