Top 70 Billy Squier Quotes

The whole British music scene of the mid-sixties had a pretty profound effect on me.

It certainly is a positive thing… having a trademark.

I had great trouble believing in myself, so I didn’t believe in my success – I didn’t enjoy my success, which I thought was insane.

Music is cyclical, but I’ve never thought of the music I make as being so off the wall or left field that it wouldn’t always have an audience that would relate to it.

I got out of the business because I went from being the biggest artist on my record label to someone they didn’t even want to have around.

I’m a huge garden and landscape fanatic.

I don’t make grandiose, prophetic statements in my songs.

I don’t feel any great need to dress in funny-looking clothes and be recognized as a star, nor do I get that much satisfaction out of hanging around all the main clubs so people can see who I am.

For me, music is this incredibly cerebral trip. You turn on the radio or put on a record, and it’s your song, it’s what you see.

If ‘Emotions in Motion’ comes out right, I can write the book on the formula rock star.

At all points, you have to look at what you’re doing and say, ‘Do I want to do this?’ ‘Am I up to it?’ ‘Am I strong enough?’

People say, ‘When are you making this comeback?’ I say, ‘It’s not a comeback, it’s a record.’ They say, ‘Where have you been all these years?’ I say, ‘I’ve been making records.’

When I was a kid, I was interested in folk music. But rock represented power, and I became the best rock guitarist in my school.

There’s this raw, basic quality people expect in my music.

Most of us, whether we like it or not, we grow up and start having a different view of what we’ve done and who we are and where we’re going.

Becoming a Top Ten artist has surprised me.

My music has been called heavy metal, but that’s not an accurate description. I’d rather call it articulate rock because it expresses many feelings and emotions.

I was a mess… It’s like ‘Rock Me Tonite’ is an MBA course on how a video can go really wrong.

I don’t try to be difficult. I just care so much about these albums that I get crazed sometimes when I’m making them.

I tend to be very methodical for a variety of reasons. I’m more of a plodder.

Seeing a young band, seeing that hunger and the raw spontaneity, is good for me. It keeps me young, so to speak.

I have a great deal of respect for myself as a musician and a writer, even if I’m not doing it anymore.

I just stopped playing. I did some screenwriting and got into the nature thing. Music kind of went away.

When I write the songs, I don’t dictate how people should interpret them.

Basically, my life was music, and I was always consumed by it.

It’s very important for me to try to get to the people. I’m not shy. It’s nice to give the fans a little extra, to let them inside.

Heavy metal to me implies a relentless, pounding, hitting-people-over-the-head music. Trend setters tend to dismiss it as basic and simple, but all the time that little trends keep coming and going, the Bob Segers, Bruce Springsteens and the Billy Squiers keep staying.

I was good at sports – basketball, football, tennis and dropped them all. At 16, I didn’t care about sports anymore.

There are a lot of cases where I’m using, if not an acoustic guitar, an electric guitar more as a rhythm instrument. Rather than blasting away, I use it to create more of an acoustic feel.

I try to remember our relative insignificance on this planet and that these seemingly important things do not mean quite as much as we think they do.

My parents are proud of me now. However, when I first became involved with rock music, they were afraid.

Take ‘The Stroke,’ for instance. Plenty of people saw sexual connotations in that song but to me it was about what goes on in the business world.

But I don’t let my bad feelings rule my life. I acknowledge them because I can’t pretend they aren’t there.

I’m the only person I know who’s never had a regular job.

I always wanted to merge heavy metal with pop music, but I think that because I grew up more with pop, the Beatles and the Stones, I tended to affiliate myself with those projects.

Music became so commercialized that I just didn’t want anything to do with it. I renounced the industry before it became the fashionable thing to do.

British rock & roll became the gospel for American kids like me.

So everybody is trying to play like Eddie Van Halen. I think it’s rubbish. I think Eddie’s great, but everyone’s trying to do what he does and it doesn’t make for a lot of interesting music.

There’s a time that you realize that you’re not gonna get out of a room without playing certain songs.

When I grew up, I had influences as diverse as Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix.

Certainly, I don’t believe in rebellion for its own sake. But I think if you strive to do something in an individualistic way, you just become a rebel by definition.

I don’t sit around going, ‘What is the matter with me? What do I have to do to get a hit?’ And I don’t also sit home and listen to my record every day and get drunk and go, ‘Wow, this is great.’

We do things instinctively and not necessarily rationally. It’s almost like we’re being controlled by unseen forces, which is something I don’t like. I’ve been making a real effort to try to find out what those forces are and get them out of my life.

I don’t really like fighting.

I started as a guitarist and couldn’t find a decent singer, so I started providing my own vocals.

I would never dispute the fact that music is my greatest love.

I’m not gonna get it all right, but I take my victories, as small as they are.

When you’re on stage playing, when I plug in a guitar and chord, I’m 16 years old again. I feel the same excitement. It’s very overwhelming. It engulfs you.

I’d gone to New York at an early age, and I got beat up a little bit, emotionally. So I thought I’d go home and go to music school.

Studio work is very methodical, while live concerts must be very spontaneous.

I’m the middle-class kid; it doesn’t sound exciting, but a lot of my audience is middle-class kids.

It would be easier to be more mysterious, but I try to be accessible.

I wouldn’t want to end up in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as the ‘Master of Hip-Hop Samples,’ but you take what you can get.

You can’t just say, ‘God help me,’ and he’s there. It takes a little bit more work on the part of the individual, I think.

I think if you’re going to a concert and spending $15 for a ticket for you and your girlfriend, then you’re going to buy a T-shirt, and you end up spending close to $100 a night, what with gas in the car and anything else to get you in the spirit of things, I just think that people deserve their money’s worth.

I mean, I would always like to play bigger places and play for more people.

I guess I could sit around and say, ‘Gee, I wish I were playing at the Capital Centre tonight instead of Hammerjacks,’ but it doesn’t happen.

Piper took me one step further in that it got my first real recording contract but the band just didn’t quite mature. It didn’t break things open, but it got me to the door.

I always loved music. I liked to go to church because I liked to sing the hymns.

I find the idea of doing what you do over and over again to be incredibly boring.

I was very humbled by the ‘one-man Led Zeppelin’ comparisons.

That’s a dangerous combination, serious and rock ‘n’ roll. But yeah, I’m pretty serious. I’ve been at this a long time, and it takes a certain amount of seriousness.

I don’t feel I have to be Jackson Browne. Still, I like to say something.

I take songwriting very seriously and I wouldn’t want anything I do to be construed as frivolous or mundane.

I was a good-looking, sexy guy. That certainly didn’t hurt in promoting my music.

I do keep my eyes and ears open but I don’t spend a lot of time looking at what other people are doing to see how I can fit in.

Singing is the form I’ve chosen to express myself. It’s the way I emote best.

Don’t Say No’ was the first album I’d done that I felt completely comfortable with.

Success hasn’t changed me at all. I’m still the same cocky, arrogant guy I’ve always been. The only difference now is that I’m busy all the time.

I don’t like pictures of me showing my hair sticking up in back.