It’s all music.
If it sounds good and feels good, then it IS good!
The wise musicians are those who play what they can master.
Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young.
Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It’s not an occupation or profession, it’s a compulsion.
There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.
A goal is a dream with a finish line.
Back in college, when I got kicked out of school, I was still in school, I’d just written the song that got me my record deal. If I hadn’t gotten kicked out of school I wouldn’t be where I am now. Three months after that, I got my record deal and the rest is history.
Music was our wife, and we loved her. And we stayed with her, and we clothed her, and we put diamond rings on her hands.
I play whatever the hell comes out… that’s it.
Your accompanist has a lot to do with how you sing, so experiment and choose your partner wisely.
Play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doing even if it does take them 15, 20 years.
An entertainer pleases others while an artist only has to please himself.
I think I was supposed to play Jazz.
As far as playing jazz, no other art form, other than conversation, can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction.
If you can’t play the Blues you might as well hang it up.
In my opinion, I think sarcasm and humor in a song, without turning it into a novelty song, is really charming.
In my family on my mother’s side we’re all church musicians first so I don’t remember a time when we weren’t doing something musical. My brothers and I sang in a little quartet, my aunts and uncles sang and my grandfather was a minister of music in our church, so walking and talking was like doing music for us.
Hipness is not a state of mind, it’s a fact of life.
A band ought to have a sound all of its own. It ought to have a personality.
Jazz is the false liquidation of art, instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.
One of the problems of people who live with pain is that they spend the whole day thinking about it, and it’s exasperating. But even when I am having a bad moment and I can’t get myself together, I get on stage and for an hour or two the pain becomes super-small. It’s about controlling the mind, telling the pain to step aside. Music does that. It’s the most fantastic drug in the world.
