Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Mainly, life experiences with my family or travelling as a young kid, I feel like I had a different lifestyle than a lot of people leaving on tour when I was fourteen and stuff, so I pull from that.
Yes I know my enemies. They're the teachers who taught me to fight me, compromise, conformity, assimilation, submission, ignorance, hypocrisy, brutality, the elite, all of which are American dreams.
The one thing about the music business is that there is no rulebook. It's not like the NFL or something where there's four downs to get ten yards or baseball where it's three strikes and you're out.
Hugs are part of everybody life for me. Hug all sorts of people - I don't worry about it looking unmanly or whatever. I think physical human contact is one of the things that makes living worthwhile.
After boarding school in Switzerland, at, like, 14 or 15, my life clicked, and I just realized, 'I don't want to be like anyone around me at my school. I don't think the world revolves around money.'
Little moments of excitement shape the sound of a record. You don't have anything, and then you start to have little parts that give you the energy to move forward because you start to see something.
Maybe 'Can't Stop Feeling' and 'Turn It On' we'll just release as singles. It's a thing The Beatles used to do which I really loved, the idea of releasing something as a single completely on its own.
I can be a woodsman if need be. I grew up very close to some forest, and I spent a lot of my formative years up and down trees, fooling around in the woods. I'm no stranger to that sort of landscape.
Starting out, I remember being on the same bill with other bands, and I always thought they were so much better because they were rehearsed and had all their moves down and they sounded really tight.
With the words, a lot of things start with questions. Some word kind of piques my interest, and I love the way it sounds, but I really don't know what it means. And I honestly don't care for a while.
The blues was like that problem child that you may have had in the family. You was a little bit ashamed to let anybody see him, but you loved him. You just didn't know how other people would take it.
I think that whenever there's a good script we try to make that happen, but it's all based off of a good story, a good script, but I don't believe you should do it just because it's African-American.
I didn't want to stay in the Stones, and be stuck in a position having to play a music I didn't like anymore and that restricted me from doing all the others things I'm interested in because of time.
I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.
I can sing very comfortably from my vantage point because a lot of the music was about a loss of innocence, there's innocence contained in you but there's also innocence in the process of being lost.
I remember as a kid being cold a lot, and hungry sometimes. Wed go to bed with just cornbread and milk, and I remember wearing shoes with holes in the bottom. I remember having twine for shoestrings.
I guess if you split the difference between the U.K. and the U.S., you would get Canada. But that's just due to proximity. Just because of distance, we get a lot more cultural spillover from America.
I wear a lot of second hand clothes unless I have a concert and then I wear beaded and sequined second hand clothes. No stylist dresses me although I do have a woman that assists me with the buttons.
I never was a liner note junkie. I didn't know who produced records or there was such a thing as a straight songwriter. I always assumed that everybody that was singing a song wrote it or made it up.
I'm used to being the only black guy. I've seriously walked onstage, looked out in the audience, 15,000 people - and I'm the only one in the place. It's no big deal. My whole career's been like that.
I thought that I wrote songs and wrote music, and that was sort of what I thought I was best at doing. And because nobody else was ever doing my songs, I felt - you know, I had to go out and do them.
Personally, being somewhat envious of Richard's (Thompson) songwriting and guitar playing, it's somewhat satisfying he's not yet achieved household-name status. It serves him right for being so good.
I saw some really amazing stuff with Axl. We worked really well together. We were good friends. And I hope to perhaps have that friendship back one day, although it's not something I wait around for.
I remember when I thought of singing as the bit that went between the guitar playing - something I couldn't wait to get out of the way. Singing was originally like a chore that I didn't really enjoy.
I didn't want to become a personality, I wanted to be a musician, but because I didn't have an album to stand by yet it was hard for people to see that. But now, two albums in, I'm happy with things.
The richest people in the world aren't particularly smart or happy. And the happiest people in the world aren't particularly smart or rich.… That leaves me making music. But we can't talk about that.
Some people... some people like cupcakes Exclusively, while myself, I say, There is naught nor ought there be nothing So exalted on the face of god's grey Earth as that prince of foods... the muffin!
Well I took her over to a soda fountain over on Bo's She had an Ice Cream Sundae and a hot cup of Jo She leaned way back just to straighten up her hose Well the ice cream melted and the coffee froze.
Give me love Give me love Give me peace on earth Give me light Give me life Keep me free from birth Give me hope Help me cope, with this heavy load Trying to, touch and reach you with, heart and soul
Without going out of my door, I can know all things on earth. Without looking out of my window I could know the ways of heaven. The farther one travels, The less one knows, the less one really knows.
I think the main thing that we have to do is try and train ourselves to remember from moment to moment that God is living within us and within everybody else, and just trying to remember to see that.
At a certain age I just stopped arguing. I realized that there was no way [my father] could see, because for him to approve of what I was doing, he would have to have some belief in me as a musician.
As long as somebody is guaranteed a certain number of sales you know you're gonna keep seeing these vanity projects. I mean they have a place, they serve a function they can bring people into comics.
I have no problem with the concept of financial riches, but if you need to change the person you are in order to achieve that, I think you're taking too much of a gamble with your personal happiness.
Science is the first expression of punk, because it doesn't advance without challenging authority. It doesn't make progress without tearing down what was there before and building upon the structure.
When I was writing my autobiography, these songs came up from time to time which were important to me, and I realized that what they really represented was, they'd come from this age of shared music.
I could have took the easy way and just been a cowboy, looking good, trying to make my money off Hank Williams and being this clean-cut guy. But I always wanted to be myself and go against the grain.
The most interesting place by far was Afghanistan. Just because it is a place that I cannot see myself living. The hardness of the people and the history of the country is just so completely intense.
I get a lot of shit because I put "I" in the lyrics all the time. The "I" is always for someone else... When I say "I," it's so that when that person is singing along with the song, it empowers them.
It sounds like I'm joking when I say it, but when I wrote 'Take Me To Church' and a lot of these things, I didn't think they would be hits. I thought I was writing for a potentially smaller audience.
The jails are full of kids from kids' homes. You're 16 years old, and you're out on the street. How you going to fend for yourself at 16 if you've not had an education? You're going to turn to crime.
I guess this is gonna sound kind of weird, but I'm not scared for myself for dying. Because I believe all these places are temporary. This is just one shell. Because we Hawaiians live in both worlds.
To play the trumpet, you have to use that diaphragm, and it's the same if you want to sing correctly. You really need to push it out from there. And I think that's what has kept me going as a singer.
This was an important part of my life. But it was also sad that we didn't play there, cause we had such alot of fans that were waiting for us and Brazilians are great people. It's now my second home.
Everyone needs to realize why am I here? It comes in everyone's life; you ask why am I here? What am I doing? Once you are able to answer that question for yourself honestly, you have smooth sailing.
Well if you were asking my personal opinion on that I think the answer can only be yes but it was missed. Much as I know I'm responsible for a lot of things, I can't wear any responsibility for that.
All of the sudden the audiences started getting younger and the spread of the attendance was really wide. I think it's as a result of the records selling more that they started following our careers.
For years, I've written narrators who aren't gender-identified. When I do autobiographical stuff, that's different, obviously. But I've always tried to keep my songs as potentially not a man's thing.
I mean the only thing that is hopefully good about us is after the arguments we can actually still face each other the next day or the day after and talk about something else and sort of get over it.
Long as I remember, rain been comin' down; Clouds of mystery fallin', confusion on the ground; Good men through the ages, trying to find the sun; And I wonder, still I wonder: Who will stop the rain?