Phil Lesh Quotes

I think my music has always been a mixture, depending on whom I'm working with - what band, what musicians, what producer.

The Sekrets record is very much me, and Dan's Emergency Room is very much him. And then Alkaline Trio is very much ours.

I don't love collabs just for the sake of collaborating. It has to be purposeful and it needs to sonically make sense.

My songwriting and my style became more complex as I listened, learned, borrowed and stole and put my music together.

It's the coolest part about writing music. I don't know how other people work, but so much is derived from some amalgamation of all these different songs that I love. That's why they jump all over the place.

Sometimes a producer and an artist get together and they make magic like Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson. As far as my own music career - you could liken my chemistry with Timbaland to Marty Scorsese and Robert De Niro.

I'm taking a lot of my favorite artists, different people, my favorite music and marrying that with what I do as a comic. It's very collaborative, arty, fun and cool.

I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll.

There's a bit of a new guard of contemporary classical musicians in New York, and we play a lot of different kinds of music together. We do pop studio sessions, and we'll also play John Cage and more avant-garde work. We're developing a language of music that comes with a lot of different styles, different kinds of work.

Guys like me and Ray Charles, when we was coming up through our days, country music and soul music was just a very thin line between the two.

I'm trying to use people like Meredith Monk and Philip Glass and Terry Riley as the backing tracks for new pop songs. It's really hard trying to use the format and write a pop song on top of avant-garde music, so we'll see. It could be cool, or it could totally flop.

Sometimes one of us will have a riff or a bass line from home but it really gels when we come together. We really have a strong special chemistry that we take advantage of when we get together.

Jazz has borrowed from other genres of music and also has lent itself to other genres of music.

I was rather disappointed, because the one thing I wanted to gain from that opportunity was to add something to his music, and have him add something to mine.

Every band needs it's own special chemistry. And Bez was a very good chemist.

The other guys in Hootie were into rock. I brought the country influence.

The Eagles are four very alpha personalities. We've all done solo work, and we've all played with very good musicians, but when the four of us get together, it becomes something that's much bigger than any one of us.

It's been amazing to create with one another because we're so different when it comes to music. We love different genres. So to vibe together and create this Fifth Harmony sound is what makes it so special.

There's no one songwriter in the band. It's collaborative, and we all have different tastes.

It's fun for musicians to step into each other's world. It's like different football teams - it's the same game but a different play.

I would love to collaborate with Hariharan Sir.

I instinctively felt Pancham and Gulzarbhai were meant to make music together.

So much of inspiration comes from collaboration with other musicians.

What I would really like to do, if I could have a sort of kingship for a short time and organize the group of my dreams - I would make one group which would be a combination of, say, Parliament and Kraftwerk - put those two together and say, "Make a record." Something that would be an extraordinary combination: the weird physical feeling of Parliament with this strange, rigid stuff over the top of it.

What we're doing now, it's usually more based on records that I've bought or a projection of what I can do well now and the inner dynamics of playing with the people I'm playing with, Janet Weiss and Joanna Bolme, what we come up with. What works for us doesn't, like, have that much relation to the past.