Van Morrison

If you’re gonna sing meaningful songs, you have to be committed to living a life that backs that up.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all.

I hear beauty and elegance combined with passion and fire.

My audience was my life. What I did and how I did it was all for my audience.

Notes are expensive… spend them wisely!

A Jazz musician is supposed to find his voice, find his niche and do his thing.

Let the music speak for itself.

Even when you write it, someone’s got to play it. So if you can play it and bypass all the rest of the things, you’re still doing as great as someone that has spent forty years trying to find out how to do that. I’m really pro-human beings, pro-expression of everything.

Sometimes I think I was making music through the wrong end of a magnifying glass.

Musicians should never forget we’re blessed. We have a special gift that people enjoy through us.

Music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential.

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

Gershwin was right in his time, at his time. Everybody else was behind.

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.