I combine aspects of many styles of music and create my own musical forms by way of electronic instruments.
I suppose I am more comfortable with jazz because I have been playing it that much longer, and also because classical music is a much more disciplined genre.
I don't really look at the charts at all. If anything, I try to out-do what I've done before. I try to make music that I like and I trust my own judgement with what will work with a wider audience. If you compare yourself to the charts, you lose perspective on what you're doing and why you're doing it.
I love Jonathan Richman - I love a lot of his music, and the thing I really like about him is his attitude. He seems very happy, and the way he performs is like, 'Don't worry, everybody, just get into it. I'm just having fun; I like when you guys are having fun.'
I believe it's possible to have hit songs and popular music that's recorded by human beings.
You know how country music stars get an extra 10 years on their life when they go to Branson? Like you're washed up, and you go to Branson, then you can last another 10 years. That's what bashing the media does.
When you're a little kid, you just like music that makes you happy and is fun. As you get older, you reach college or your 20s and you decide that music should be challenging and all art should be smart. So you start to think it makes you like high art more to put down things you consider low art. I don't even think things are low art.
From childhood I was passionately fond of music and wanted to be a musician. I have no recollection of any real desire ever to be anything else.
Michael Jackson was the biggest star the world has ever seen - he put so much into everything; a lot of attention to detail. I want to do that. I want to pay that kind of attention to detail in everything - in music, visually - all of that.
I was obsessed with country music when I was a kid, and it's definitely had a huge influence on the way I write songs. I was always attracted to songs that had a brilliant pun or a clever turn of phrase, but came from a dark, bitter place. As a writer, I've always gravitated towards that feeling.
I thought we were gonna open up the world of poetry and music to all kinds of things, and yet, I can't really think of anyone who's done anything like it since.
Since I was a child, my whole life has revolved around music. It's often while listening to a song that ideas for my fashion collections formed.
I try to do things that keep me interested. And play music that moves me. I like to move around and play in a lot of different ways.
They all knew my name, but no one heard the music - I didn't look the same.
So much of listening to lyrically driven music is projecting your own feelings and experiences into the music.
I went to school and studied music for a year at USC, which unlocked a bunch of doors for me in terms of my relationship to music.
I've started listening to music in a new way after I started running. When it comes to running, I really got into the idea of track listings that way, too.
Whenever I make music, I just make it depending on however I feel at that moment and what I'm getting inspiration from, so it depends - whatever, it's just my mood.
To play music, you have to understand it. I didn't understand 'Topographic Oceans.' That's why I hardly played on it. It frustrated me no end - and playing the whole thing on tour, I got farther and farther away from it.
Country music is the song that speaks to the American condition. It's middle America. Eight out of 10 people. Maybe it's not the No. 1 choice, but they listen to country.
There's something so wonderful about writing in rhyme where it isn't just the meaning of the words, it's the music to the words and the shape and the sound.
I care about music and money. I'm an artist first.
Every small town has its dramatic group, its barber-shop quartet, every home has music in one form or another.
I've always listened to music, since I was really, really young.
I have always believed that the material world is governed by nonmaterial sources, so that in that sense 'English Music' is an exercise in the spiritual as well as the material. I have always been attracted to the Gothic and spiritual imagination, and I've always been interested in visionaries.
I've grown up with my parents' music tastes, listening to Fleetwood Mac and the Rolling Stones.
I think I skipped a lot of music, like when I was 17 or 18. I didn't know about a lot of new bands because I was so immersed in older music.
I guess from 12 onwards I was always into my music.
I'm born and raised Long Island. Billy Joel, Paul Simon, Ben Gibbard - melody-driven guys... They shaped me, molded my music.
The problem for me, still today, is that I write purely with one dramatic structure and that is the rite of passage. I'm not really skilled in any other. Rock and roll itself can be described as music to accompany the rite of passage.
The most successful stuff is sold to you as indispensable social information. The message in the music is, 'We are terribly, terribly slick and suave, and if you listen to us, you can probably get a leg up in society, too.'
Since her landmark 'Tapestry,' Carole King has both oversimplified and over elaborated that masterful album's style until her music has become something more overtly but less effectively personal.
The brain knows the real secret of seduction, more effective than even music and martinis. Just keep whispering, 'Gee, you are really special' to that sack of water and protein that is a body, and you can get it to do practically anything.
Girls are sitting around talking about boys, right? Or complaining about boys, when they have their heart broken or whatever, and they need music for that, right? And they need music for that. So it's hard to find the right music. Not everyone has the right list or knows a DJ.
When I have a chunk of time that I can really dedicate to music, I really want to get into it. I want to do some really hard stuff and push myself.
I believe that filmmakers have to internalize the story and subtext so well that all of the departments can start to speak to each other - that music can speak to cinematography can speak to writing and back again.
