We want to just make music that impacts people - we don't really care about the rest.
I'm probably writing music now for the same reason as I started writing songs when I was 14 - to meet women.
Though I did M.Sc. from Dharamshala, I was always attracted towards music.
But ya know what, I am a part of something that happened. I'm a part of the music that happened. My voice is one more instrument, is what it is. So that's the way I feel about people who play on sessions.
You're just playing, playing, playing, and then an image or something will come into your mind, and basically you're just narrating it with music, letting it move along.
When I became more involved in music, I had to give up some of my writing in the literary sense. However, on occasion, I would write something for my own pleasure or I would write notes and introductory remarks in the songbooks I put together.
I got obsessed with classical music, I got obsessed with Chopin, with playing the piano.
The first time that I came to New York to work properly was the mid-'80s, but I was doing eight shows a week. You have no life. Going to a punk rock club - or whatever the music was at that time - would not have been on my agenda.
I like a no-drama set. I welcome visitors by and large; I like music playing on sets between set-ups - all that stuff.
We're like old people now playing music. I'm so glad we stuck it out because it's a lot better. I used to feel kind of anxious. Now our apprenticeship is over.
Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.
Dave Van Ronk is not an obscure figure. He's the biggest figure on an obscure scene, playing a kind of niche music that we knew and liked.
Mozart would play a counterpart with his left hand while using his right to mock it. It was blue, dark, shadowy - and it made me feel something. That's when I realized music was inside me.
If it's a good song and it fits me, that's what I'm going to do, I'm not out there trying to change the world. I'm just out there trying to sing country music the best way I can.
Music doesn't lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music.
I love to read. I love to stretch. In the morning, I get up, and if I'm not in a hurry, I will lie on the floor on a rug, look through some books and magazines, and maybe listen to music and try to do stretching exercises to tune up.
My music is not just about entertainment. It is about enlightenment also.
If our music survives, which I have no doubt it will, then it will because it is good.
I've worked since I was 11 years old, playing music and following the dream, and shaking and moving and doing it. And then, you have cancer and it was like 'Ooooohh.' It was like a big eraser. It was the only thing in my life that had ever made me just stop.
I used to listen to Judy Garland all the time - I love Judy Garland and her music. But I started to realize that if you keep singing like that, singing songs of being victimized by love over and over and over again, it can't help but have a profound effect on your life.
My mother and my great-aunt told me stories, like how when my grandfather first met my grandmother at a party, he noticed her long legs and was like, 'Woo woo!' I like to incorporate those stories into my music. They just seem to fit.
All my books are about one major idea and two or three subsidiary ones. I have thought a lot about music when constructing books, and I like the way in music that themes come back.
I went to school in Gainesville because it was a huge punk and folk town. So I went to class twice a week, and then I went to shows and wrote. I did a lot of music writing before I actually started playing music.
I grew up in New York City in the '80s, and it was the epicenter of hip-hop. There was no Internet. Cable television wasn't as broad. I would listen to the radio, hear cars pass by playing a song, or tape songs off of the radio. At that time, there was such an excitement around hip-hop music.
I like seeing the cameras because it helps visualize how the music people and the movie people teamed up.
One of my favorites is 'The Sound of Music'. When Julie Andrews runs through the hills singing her head off, I always wish that a gust of wind would blow her skirt up.
Learning how to improvise really awakened my interest in music.
I think maybe since there isn't a great deal of access to the mainstream media and people don't understand the language of mainstream media, if you put music out there with lyrics that are loosely political, people absorb some of it and spit it back out.
What I love the most is getting on the ice and just popping in a fabulous CD and skating - all by myself, the rink completely empty, just me and the music.
I don't see it in terms of changing things, but rather using language and music as weapons for fighting a mainstream media which is predominately right wing, and loyal to the political framework and its corporate interests.
I have my ideas, I have my music and I also just enjoy showing off, so that's a big part of it. Also, I like to get up onstage and behave insanely or express myself physically, and the band can get pretty silly.
I think I first realized I wanted to be in country music and be an artist when I was 10. And I started dragging my parents to festivals, and fairs, and karaoke contests, and I did that for about a year before I came to Nashville for the first time. I was 11 and I had this demo CD of me singing Dixie Chicks and Leanne Rimes songs.
I wouldn't mind producing a movie with a music storyline, but acting in one is too close to home.
If you make music for the human needs you have within yourself, then you do it for all humans who need the same things. You enrich humanity with the profound expression of these feelings.
Music is your own talent and is an important tool. Even if you don't want to be a role model, get ready to be in the public eye. Energy is there, you just have to use it.
A lot of the hip hop artists don't write music. They write words.
