in Quotes & Aphorisms (Music)
When words leave off, music begins.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Music)
I'm sick of people who always try to blame movies, bands, songs, or talk shows for whatever: teen suicides, drug overdoses or everything else. If someone is stupid enough to kill himself because of a song, then that's exactly what they deserve, they weren't contributing anything to the society, it's one less idiot in the world. There's too many people, if more people kill themselves over music, it wouldn't disappoint me. What would disappoint me is that people are that stupid.
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There's only one person in the United States we ever wanted to meet, not that he wanted us. And we met him last night. We can't tell you how we felt. We just idolised him so much. You can't imagine what a thrill that was last night. Nothing really affected me until I heard Elvis. If there hadn't been an Elvis, there wouldn't have been the Beatles.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Music)
Everything I've ever done is out. I don't have boxes of unreleased stuff. There's nothing in the files. I can never keep anything unless I don't like the sound of it or it didn't work. If I can sing it to an engineer, I can sing it to anyone...
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Music)
What I do when I write is that I'll do a raggedy, rough version just to hear the chorus, just to see how much I like the chorus. If it works for me that way when it's raggedy, then I'll know it will just work... Listen to that, that's at home. Janet, Randy, Me... Janet and I are going "Whoo, Whoo... Whoo, Whoo..." I do that same process with every song. It's the melody, it's the melody that's most important, If the melody can sell me, then I'll go to the next step. The idea is to transcribe from what's in your mentality onto tape. If you take a song like "Billie Jean," Where the bass line is the prominent, dominant piece, the protagonist of the song, the main driving riff that you hear, getting the character of the riff to be just the way you want it to be, that takes a lot of time. Listen, you're hearing four basses on there, doing four different personalities, and that's what gives it character, but it takes a lot of work.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Music)
To me, ballads are special, because you can have a pop song that'll be know for three weeks and then you'll hear nothing else about it. Nobody else will record it and it'll just be gone. But if you do a good ballad, it'll be in the world forever.
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It can't go on forever. The thing that bugs me is that I get treated like The Grandfather of Pop, just like James Brown is regarded as The Grandfather of Soul - and I do get treated like that. Now, I'm only three years older than David Bowie. Or is it two? I don't know why we've kept going. I think really because we were successful. But that's sort of begging the question.
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The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Music)
If good music has charms to soothe the savage breast, bad music has no less powerful spells for filling the mildest breast with rage, the happiest with horror and disgust. Oh, those mammy songs, those love longings, those loud hilarities! How was it possible that human emotions intrinsically decent could be so ignobly parodied.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Music)
If I hadn't gone to a private Christian school, I'd never have built up enough animosity to want to have started a band. And now that I have one, the fact that they are giving me such resistance and publicity, they have made me far bigger than they'd ever have wanted me to have become. So I guess in a strange way the Christians have influenced me the most.
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