Ryan Cabrera Quotes

The most important thing is that you honor that musical integrity, whether you make music that sounds like ABBA or you make music that sounds like Void.

I don't think we were anti-commercial. But we were anti-contrivance, and like Zeppelin, we found dignity through the music we were playing.

I try to make my music interesting to me first, then hopefully other people will find it interesting, too.

I never do anything to strictly satisfy a fickle, ever-changing commercial world. I do the music I like to play. It's the only way I feel comfortable existing in the industry.

I just wanted to keep consistent and keep true to America and not seem contrived. I didn't want to seem contrived at all with any song choice that might be a detriment to my journey on 'The Voice.'

I can make a record with six-part string arrangements and the best musicians in the world and have it be not genuine. I'd rather make a genuine record that I truly stand behind and have it fall where it may.

I've never believed in cheapening music by going according to what some people think is public taste.

I am quite certain in my heart of hearts that modern music and modern art is not a conspiracy, but is a form of truth and integrity for those who practise it honestly, decently and with all their being.

When I'm writing music, I'm not playing a character. I'm not Alice Cooper or Gene Simmons or someone like that, who has acknowledged that they are writing music for a character.

You look at Michael McDonald and people like that; I think they just tried to write music that was true to themselves. That's our bottom line. Whatever people view us as, I think as long as we try to create good music that will win out in the end.

Whenever I hear somebody cover a song, I don't like to hear it stray too far from the original. I like to hear some of the new energy that a band will put into it, but you kind of want to hear some of the basic parts of the song. I mean, that's what makes it the song that you like.

Great music is its own movie, already. And the challenge, as a music fan, is to keep the song as powerful as it wants to be, to not tamper with it and to somehow give it a home.

The whole process of music for me is something absolutely honest and really naked and bare, so I never forced myself to write in French.

The way that I've always gone about making music, the rule of thumb, has just been to make what I love.

We're not on a desperate mission to write chart compatible stuff.

I don't make records that way, where I'm trying to please the marketplace or anything. Not because I have anything against that, it's just never been a part of my aesthetic, even when I was with the Pixies.

The way we're going about things and what we want to do, we feel it has to be a really pure essence of music. That's where you get the most out of it.

Learn your instrument. Be honest. Don't do anything phony. There is so much crap floating around. There is plenty of room for a bit of honest writing.

In the past, I tried to be more of a typical session guitarist. I wasn't so concerned with impressing anybody.

I have a repertoire of songs that I'm proud of, that I've written for my own band. When I do a cover, something that somebody else has written, I think about it very carefully before I sing that song. I have to really get behind it and understand it and like it. And that's how I pick roles. I don't want to play just anything.

Maybe someday you can accuse somebody of being a poseur by selling out and playing blues music, but that's just not going to happen in my lifetime.

I think every artist should follow their vision, their hearts is what they need to reveal, not something that society is looking out for.

I think I'm sort of blind to genre. As long as it has a sort of honesty about it, which I think you'll hear in whatever music you respond to, then I think it doesn't need to be called anything particularly.

If I go into a studio and find my truth of the moment, there are a number of people in the world who can relate to what I'm saying and are going to buy into what I'm doing. Not because it's the new thing of the moment, but because it's genuine emotion. Its how I feel. This is how I articulate the world.

You have to focus hard on recording songs that you believe in.