Johann Johannsson Quotes

I've been making music for a long time, since I was very young, but at the same time, I'm still exploring what works for me. I feel like I'm just starting out.

The way I evolved was playing straight-ahead jazz into playing more fusion-type stuff just because I was young enough to get into it. As I get older, I find myself coming back to where I kind of started.

I did country way back when I was, like, 13-14 years old, and then I kind of fell into the pop genre.

I was trying to make my name just Artist in the beginning, but it was weird at first, because I wasn't an R&B singer or nothing. Not an R&B singer. I didn't do no melodic songs, none of that yet.

A lot of the songs that I wrote during 'Pt. 1' and 'Pt. 2' are the first songs that I ever wrote that sounded like that. I was in this phase - a certain creative space in my life - personally and musically.

I think that the only goals that we try to set for ourselves is to evolve musically.

Even on tour, where I perform songs from 'City Of Black And White,' I still do songs from 'Nothing Left To Lose.' I never turned my back on that material. On some albums, you change - that's all. The trick is to follow your heart and do what feels right.

People always want to talk about who I was, but I've always been singing, always been experimenting with pop music.

I love stretching myself musically.

It's probably a combination of personal and non-personal matters that have led us to where we are musically.

You're a constant student, as a musician.

On 'Van Halen,' I was a young punk, and everything revolved around the fastest kid in town, gunslinger attitude. But I'd say that at the time of 'Fair Warning,' I started concentrating more on songwriting. But I guess in most people's minds I'm just a gunslinger.

I think that every band tries to mature their sound through their existence, you know?

I grew up listening to everything. I have such a love for music, but I don't want to make the same album over and over again.

My first album was me finding myself and my voice, finding how I sing. I was rolling with the punches because everything was new to me.

I will go through these style phases. I think it's confusing in some ways. People like bands to be really consistent.

When I was 19, I joined a rock band, and that's when I began to say, 'Okay, this is something that I could take seriously.' When I came to Minneapolis, it just refined everything.

The band is a living, breathing thing. It grows in the same way we do as human beings and if it doesn't, it dies. It's important to feed the organism, and one way of doing that is to set musical challenges that keep it alive.

I prefer to think of myself as a musician who is still learning and trying to do something every time out.

I'm really maturing into soul music. It's not my attempt or karaoke try. I feel like I really embody the music now that I am 36.

Jazz is not the format where I want to stay, but it really is a starting point for me.

By the time I did that third solo album, I'd finally learned how to do it, but I'd also learned that I liked being in a band.

As you grow older, your music begins to mature and grow older along with you.

When I listen to and play the songs from 'Narrow Stairs' now, that record feels like a record where we had established a style that arguably was more our own than it was in the beginning. Going into that record, I felt a lot more confident in my songwriting. It was a fairly prolific time for me.

In my honest opinion, in 'Volumes I' and 'II,' we were still trying to figure out our sound.