Yes, but I have to say this: the band is going to decide where the band plays.
I was in this public high school in Princeton, and it had this topnotch jazz program – if you were a musician of any kind of caliber, your holy grail was to be in that orchestra. It was that claim to fame of the school, of the town, other than the university. But it was better than the university band.
One of the things I’ve always personally tried to stress with this band was to have some kind of visual aspect and to be consistent with it – like, not to change.
I’m about as privileged as you can get. I’m a white, male, heterosexual front man of a rock band.
I think it was probably down to the fact that we weren’t together personally as a band. We weren’t pulling in the same direction. I always feel if you’re having a good time in the studio it actually comes across on the tape and that was a bit of a miserable album for us.
There’ll be no oiling up with this band. The oil has been there for years and it only gets better.
The guys in my band are great-we watch movies, we eat pizza, take walks, read books. Everybody has a really great sense of humor. And my boyfriend comes and visits me on the road.
Even though we’re not the most punk rock band, the way we’ve done things is pretty punk rock. Just kinda say it with a big middle finger to the record labels and do it ourselves.
My dad was good friends with the Bad Medicine Blues Band – one of the only blues bands in Fargo, as you can imagine! He took me out to see them play when I was 12 years old and I was really inspired by their guitar player, Ted Larsen.
I think there is always room for a timeless sounding rock band like us.
So I was always around music and my dad was in his own way a progressive jazzer, a big band jazzer guy.
There’s a band from Brooklyn called Frankie Cosmos, which is very nice.
When I came out of the military, I had a club in Memphis and I started using the The Bar Kays as my club band. They were still only in the middle school – but I’d take them on the road with me on the weekends, sometimes.
The place we go as a band is a sort of samadhi, intensely emotional and not bound by self-thinking. And lyrically, one of the goals is to suggest that something is going on beyond what you can see.
Even the two times that I left, I never really felt like I left the band. It’s very bizarre. It’s like there’s sort of an umbilical cord that stretches between us spiritually.
Music rhythms are mathematical patterns. When you hear a song and your body starts moving with it, your body is doing math. The kids in their parents’ garage practicing to be a band may not realize it, but they’re also practicing math.
It’s terrifying to play your favorite band’s song in front of your favorite band.
When we did a lot of that Motown stuff there were four of us on the front line. When we started the evening we’d start from one end of the band and just go along. The lead singer would change all the time. That’s the first time that I actually managed to put it into a record.
I loved being in a band.
Electricity transmission operates on a frequency between 49.7 Hertz and 50.2 Hertz. What I have done is petitioned the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission and squeezed this band to now 49.9 Hertz to 50.1 Hertz. This will contain volatility.
I thought I might be a band instructor, someone who plays all the instruments and teaches others.
One of the reasons we survive as a band is that we are seen as a band of today. We don’t want to be seen as a band that tours and plays old songs. We feel that we are making the best music of our careers.
We manage to bounce ideas off one another. Every band fights, but at the end of the day, we’re very positive about the way we fight. At least we come out with a result.
Every 15, 20, 25 years, a new rock and roll record needs to come out and a new rock and roll band needs to come out.
What’s cool about indie rock is that one band can do effectively the same thing as another band, and one band nails it, and the other one doesn’t. I like that elusiveness.
I am very proud of The Saints and I’m very glad that I’ve been associated with them all these years, but the next record is the best record… has to be the philosophy for any band that remains even halfway decent or vibrant, and that is kind of where my head’s at.
It was great being together as a band, but much more difficult being brothers than it was being in a band.
Living composers writing for big band are very few and far between. There are not a lot of them, and I have a talent for doing it. I am zeroing in on what I do best.
I had the first integrated Army band in World War II.
I think Alison Krauss and her band are the best today. The same goes for Rick Skaggs and his band.
Being in a different band always brings great musical experiences to be able to draw on.
All I can say is thank God my stepdaughter’s favourite band in the whole wide world is The Beatles. We do have dance parties to ‘Wannabe’ though.
Who on earth would expect a band such as Nightwish, to give you, of all people, the phone call, ‘Hey, can you come and join us now?’ Yeah, that turned everything upside down.
I learned the songs and played the gigs, and then they called me about a month later. They told me they were like super stoked on me and asked me to join their band.
We’re not a political band. We don’t want to tell people what to do or what to think. We just want to tell them to think.
When you’re playing music, say for instance, you’re playing a part of the band and you’re looking at your music, your horn is down into the stand. This way, it’s up and it goes right on out to the audience, you know?
I haven’t a great jazz band, and I don’t want one.
I’m not a toy boy, bellybutton band, so I don’t have to worry about that. Actually, I never did.
I was in several bands before I joined Judas Priest. Being in those early unknown bands were the stepping stones, really, so I learned a lot in those short few years jumping from one band to another.
I was a really crazy kid. I’m still a crazy kid. That’s the nice thing about being in a rock band. You can feel 14 forever.
I had previously been in the band the Modern Lovers with Jonathan Richman.
And I’ve played piano since I was little, so I was originally the piano player in the band.
The Misfits pretty much funds the Misfits. It used to cost me money to be in the band. I think we got paid the last gig we ever did. After that, we had to work to support our families.
I mean, I think I liked every band I ever played in because each band was different, each band had a different concept, and each band leader was different… different personalities and musical tastes.
I grew up playing about 15 instruments and the way that I was able to accomplish that was by cutting my classes, hanging out in the band room all day, and going from one instrument to the next to the next, until I learned how to play everything by ear.
Music’s been with me from the get-go. It was always around me as a kid. Dad got me my first guitar when I was 11 and, at school, if you wanted to be cool you had to be in a band.
There’s no one songwriter in the band. It’s collaborative, and we all have different tastes.
The bass should be the note of the bass drum, and then you’ve got the engine of the band that everything else builds on. Everything else, the guitar, the keyboards, is a colour.
We should have gone over years before that. I always wanted to and I think most of the band did.
My first influences for playing were Johnny Ramone and Jimmy Page, the same as everybody else. Joe Perry. The guys in Alice Cooper’s band, whatever their names were. Mick Ronson from David Bowie. You know who really influenced me to write songs? Iron Maiden.
What I’ve always lacked is a really strong band to back me up.
I’m the kind of person who would love to play whenever I felt like, with a band, and it might as well be the Holiday Inn in Nebraska – somewhere where no one knows you, and you’re in a band situation just playing music.
Some bands blow it before they even play. The most important moment of any show is when a band walks out with the red amp lights glowing, the flashlight that shows each performer the way to his spot on the stage. It’s crucial not to blow it. It sets the tempo of the show; it affects everyone’s perception of the band.
The shows are so different from each other, depending on whether I play with my band, Nine Stories, other musicians, an orchestra, only one or two members of my band.
We’re not arrogant, we just believe we’re the best band in the world.
It was by listening to Goodman’s band, that I began to notice the guitarist Charlie Christian, who was one of the first musicians to play solos in a big band set-up.
This band is a real collaboration, and I’m greatful to anybody who can appreciate our music. It doesn’t have to be a certain kind of fan or person or anything. I think there’s a little bit of something for everybody on this record.
I always told the people at Cal Arts that if they wanted me to do Jazz studies, first of all, there couldn’t be a big band within 500 miles and that I could do what I wanted to do. And they said I could.
It’s only people that aren’t goths that think the Cure are a goth band.
