Julian Ovenden Quotes

I play music the way it was played in yesteryear.

The bottom line is, I tend to be going back to older and older music.

I have been told that my voice is very suited to oldies albums.

My musical taste is somewhat dated - I mean, freeze frame, go back 60 years, and you're in my comfort zone.

My dad has actually really influenced me musically. I have a weird love for '80s and '90s music. A lot of people are like, 'Are you serious? It's so lame.' But my dad always plays that in the car whenever we're together.

It seems like bluegrass people have more great stories to tell than other musicians.

There are now grandmothers and grandfathers coming to see us because they are of that age, they grew up in the '50s and '60s and they bring their sons and their daughters to hear the songs they heard when they were young.

Amazingly, I've been sort of an anomaly in the music industry. I feel like I've been able to exist as kind of a throwback artist.

Their eagerness for the big-band music and their ability to grasp the essence of it made me realize that today's generation has not been properly exposed to the big-band sound.

I don't use old music.

I have lots of records, quite a collection, actually, that I stole from my mom. I have the original 'Thriller' album and I have a really great 'Elton John's Greatest Hits,' and I also have a N.E.R.D. album. Records sound more original. They have more edge.

It's not until I hear songs that I've done, that I realize how much of an inspiration music from the '60s and '70s has been.

I'm a '90s kid, so I went into the entire album process wanting to incorporate little touches of that sound from hip-hop and R&B. Just enough to where you hear it subtly and then go, 'This kind of reminds me of that time.'

I'm a little bit out of it, I suppose; I'm more of the golden oldie type.

If I were to categorize what I sing, I have many different influences, and a lot of them are from back in time.

There is a wealth of twentieth century music that is being re-discovered by a generation that hasn't heard it.

It was only later on that I became more interested in older music.

I started buying records in the '80s. I listened to everything new wave, disco, funk synth-pop, rock, but in my house we were listening to bossa nova, tango, and folk.

Singing in Gaelic is very, very natural to do. I think lends itself very much so to being sung.

Most modern stuff I hear kinda sucks, someone should turn me onto something good, fast!

I miss the 80's as well, it was a truly great decade for music.

My mom was a folk singer and Celtic harpist. My dad was in a barbershop quartet and my great grandma was an opera singer. As I grew up, I discovered pop music and Top 40 radio, but it was in the '90s, so music was very different then - it was really lyrical.

Old music used to mean something. There is none of that today.

I don't listen to a lot of new stuff. I just like the old stuff. It's all quite dramatic and atmospheric. You'd have an entire story in song. I never listen to, like, white music - I couldn't sing you a Zeppelin or Floyd song.

I think The Doors are one of the classic groups, and I think we're all tempted to feel like the time in which we grew up was somehow special, but I really do believe that there were two golden eras in music: The Forties and Fifties of big band, jazz and swing, and the Sixties and Seventies of rock. To me, they're really unparalleled.