The time is now.
I am a devout musician.
I kept thinking there’s bound to be something else? I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn’t play it.
They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.
You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.
Master your instrument, master the music and then forget all that and just play.
Once I could play what I heard inside me, that’s when I was born.
Sometimes I just think that there are more things to be said to make the audience understand what I’m trying to do more. When I’m singing, I don’t want you to just hear the melody. I want you to relive the story, because most of the songs have pretty good storytelling.
Being so inescapably a part of it, I’ll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels and that’s too bad.
Music is an extraordinary vehicle for expressing very powerful emotions. That’s what draws people towards it.
A drummer has to be kind-hearted.
When you hear my lyrics, you hear the shots that I throw at people. I throw shots because I always been the underdog. I got rejected so many times, and I say it in my lyrics constantly.
I’m still searching even today for a sound, like the guy that’s searching for a home. I haven’t been able to find that completely. I’m satisfied at times with the sound of my guitar… but it is a little sound that I hear but I can’t tell anybody about it. I don’t know how. But if I ever get it, I’ll know.
You usually can’t tell what’s inspiring until you look back on it.
I like the interplay in the music.
The louder they [the band] play the softer I sing.
To get the music the way you want it, there’s a lot of work involved.
When you sing, always tell the truth.
There are a million good tunes.
No one remembers who wrote the tune, putting pen to paper in some lonely place. They remember who had the hit.
Silence is what makes music sexy. I just move blocks of silence around. The notes are an afterthought.
A young tenor player was complaining to me that Coleman Hawkins made him nervous. Man, I told him Hawkins was supposed to make him nervous! Hawkins has been making other sax players nervous for forty years!
