Everybody in our family studied a musical instrument. My father was really big on that. Somehow I only took a year or two of piano lessons and I convinced my father to let me take dancing lessons.
Piano should be the one. Yeah, because that’s your basis. Everything is right there in front of you.
There’s always been a piano around the house, and I’ve grown up around it. It’s a massive part of my life and always has been.
I write on the acoustic guitar, I write some on the piano, but I’ve been messing around with these guitar pedals and drum machines, educating myself in that world.
I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.
When I was a kid, my parents encouraged me to take many different classes. Piano was one that I really fell in love with.
My wife is a classically trained piano player, and she also orchestrates.
I was playing the piano when I was three, writing songs when I was ten. I had a lot of experience before I got to college. I knew I wanted to be a singer, so anyone who met me, I didn’t let too much time pass before I showed my talent.
I played piano growing up. I played classical piano since I was 5, and I sang in choirs, and I sang in plays and musicals.
My father was a musician and wanted me to study piano. I had no interest.
The movie business is very difficult but the music business is just impossible. So I’ll play in bands and record and play songs with other people, but for me it’s a form of expression that all I need is me. I don’t need cameras or agents, I can just have a piano and sing and feel totally verified.
I like to play the ukulele, but I’m not, like, awesome at it. I mostly play the piano and the guitar.
The piano and the singing are two equal things to me – maybe not inseparable but very connected. You can say they are like two equal voices.
I’m an intense guy. I run 10 miles a day, which helps alleviate my intensity. Also, singing helps defuse my intensity. Playing the piano helps, and writing helps.
My mother was a jazz fanatic and she wanted me to play the piano so I could play jazz tunes. I wish I had learned but I was too busy getting into trouble!
Showing your movie to an audience… it’s like your kid doing a piano recital. ‘Just let it not fail. Please.’
Making lyrics feel natural, sit on music in such a way that you don’t feel the effort of the author, so that they shine and bubble and rise and fall, is very, very hard to do. Whereas you can sit at the piano and just play and feel you’re making art.
I was coerced into taking piano lessons in the early ’50s. It was a quite unpleasant experience.
I was a piano major with Craig Robinson from ‘The Office.’ Me and Craig were very close in college at Illinois State University… It’s so bizarre to see us out here now doing things.
I remember him watching me through the crack of a door singing with a hairbrush. I was in front of his mirror. I think he wanted me to sing. He would get me on the table and make me sing sometimes or play the piano. He was very encouraging on that front.
Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.
I might have a guitar or a piano on set to play something for the actors.
I tried a little of everything when I was little. I tried karate, I tried ballet, I tried piano lessons and singing lessons… I was a pretty normal kid, for the most part.
I remember being a little kid sitting in the living room with my brother and some friends from around the neighborhood, and I would sit at the piano and as they were running around the room doing different things and being silly, acting out, I would actually play the score for it – the music that went along with it.
When I was young, I just sat down and started playing Chopsticks at the piano. I got so far and then lost interest. Eventually, I regained it and started writing songs.
Family is everything, although I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked with some of the most amazing minds over the years, including Renzo Piano, John Young, Graham Stirk and Ivan Harbour.
I’ve got my Grammys on top of my piano and I look at them when I play.
My activities tend to revolve around crossword puzzles, reading and playing piano and games with my friends.
Last year, I finally got my own grand piano, and that was a big thing for me because it’s always been and always will be a very important part of my life.
When I was starting out in this business, that was the norm. You did it all. You looked around, and entertainers could dance, sing, play the piano, act, make you laugh.
I play guitar, piano, and I’m learning to play the drums.
I’ve never been able to sit round on my own and play drums, practice in the back room, never been able to. I’ve always played with other musicians. It’s how I play, there’s no joy for me in playing on my own, bashing away. I need a bass, a piano, guitar, whatever, and then I can play.
And I definitely have an affinity with the piano.
Though I played classical piano since age 5 and sang in a cappella groups, being an artist didn’t seem like something I was talented enough to do full time. So I kind of buried that dream.
I have a lot of alter-egos: I would love to be a back-up singer for someone someday. I have an electronic side-project. I have a ’90s grunge side project; I have a piano project… I have this industrial, goth-electronic song, super creepy sounding, just really dark and dreary.
I play piano and guitar and I do write my own stuff so to a certain extent I know what I want to do in regards to music. But I’m still finding out what kind of music is my favourite kind to listen to, never mind do myself so I’ve got a lot of time to find out myself and develop myself as an artist.
You know, my family is very musical, I was surrounded by it. And from four years old I was the one that asked my mother could I take piano lessons.
In high school, I was always into Jerry Lee Lewis, and they decided they needed a piano player for the jazz band. I had my little boogie-woogie thing that I did, so I did my little boogie-woogie thing. I had a very high-pitched voice.
When I’m playing live, I’ll rip out a ballad from my album, and I’ll play that solo on the piano, which feels really good because it kind of takes me back to when I was younger.
Baldwin is sort of getting to be a bit funny. I don’t know what happened, but a few years ago they suddenly went bankrupt and Gibson bought the whole outfit. Since then they haven’t seemed to be doing an awfully good job of providing pianos.
If you think hard enough about it, Rowlf the dog playing the piano on ‘The Muppet Show’ – what kind of insanity was happening underneath the cameras to make that happen? His mouth is moving, and he’s got two hands playing the piano. That’s two people under there!
I’m somebody who plays the piano… sometimes.
I’ve played every instrument you could possibly think of for 10 minutes. So I’m mediocre at everything. I can play drums, guitar, piano, violin, saxophone, clarinet, flute… Just not well.
When I write, I write the drum beat. Though sometimes I write on piano or guitar.
My father left his piano at the house when he left, and I wasn’t allowed to play it when he was there because I wasn’t as good as him. So when he left, I was determined to get as good as him, and I taught myself how to play music, and I just stuck with it, and I did it all the time.
I was aware of that theme of mortality in my music since around 2009. The decaying and the disappearance of the piano sound is very much symbolic of life and mortality. It’s not sad. I just meditate about it.
I played piano for about two years when I was a kid. I didn’t play long enough to be really great.
I never use a piano stool. I always use a drum stool. Because I feel that when you’re down there, you’re playing in that way you’re supposed to. I like to be above it.
I have that huge print from Pollock by the piano because the influence is reciprocal. He was into hearing music while he created, and I sometimes do the opposite. I’m influenced by everything from an ant to a dream.
I have more energy at the end than I do at the beginning. You can be so beat up that you can scarcely walk on stage but when you get to the piano the excitement kicks in, you forget about being tired.
I liken movies to playing a piano: Sometimes you’re playing the chords and different notes with unresolved cadences and playing all major chords that are all over the place, and you’re enjoying yourself with a great, simple melody.
Schumann’s ‘Quintet in E flat for Piano and Strings’ is one of the sublime moments in Romantic music.
I was fifteen years old, and I hardly knew how to play a simple Bach prelude on the piano when I began to compose music, and at the most advanced level. I had never studied such things as harmony.
I liked the piano. I always liked playing. I just hated homework.
When I was a kid, I’d practise Chopin on piano – and I love Chopin! He’s my dawg! Then I’d go out on the stoop and blast the radio. I’m from New York, the concrete jungle. Hip-hop influenced me from day one.
My aunt took me to see ‘Salad Days’ when I was seven. This story of a magic piano that infects everyone who hears it infected me, too. It was a Road to Damascus moment in my life.
Well, we have theatrical parties. It’s not me singing. People like to get up and jam on the piano.
