Justin Hayward Quotes

I would find the idea of compiling a setlist that doesn't wildly excite me to be too restricting.

At the end of the day, they're happy if you do the obvious songs towards the end of the set and you've got to try and make yourself happy by doing certain songs at the front end of the set.

I've always had a bazillion songs in my archive, but I want to play people stuff they know. Now that I have two albums' worth of material, that gives me freedom to compose a set that's more well-balanced and build a show rather than just a recital of some songs.

The problem is, when you're working with orchestras, you only get the orchestra for about two hours before the performance to pull it all together, and that doesn't sound like a real collaboration.

That's one of my problems is that there are so many songs to sing that I sort of get indecisive about what I want to do in a show - because there are so many possibilities! There are so many great songs out there.

I did some research and tried to pull out some old, classic Van Halen that they had not played in 10 or 15 years. I think that was Sammy's mistake. I he didn't want to do the Dave stuff.

I have a hard time narrowing things down to ten or 12 songs. If I walk off stage in anything less than two hours, it just feels strange. It feels early.

So you can have your program, but you also have to be ready to change it immediately because there are certain kinds of people who like certain kinds of songs and they like - some people want to dance when you come out, some people just want to be intimate with you. So you kind of feel your way through a show.

It's not a bad problem to have because a lot of classic acts are known for one or two songs and in their show they basically hold those songs off until the end and you sit through an hour or so of lesser known material but in our case most of the songs are well known.

As far as my favorite songs to perform live, most of the songs we did live were my favorite. If they weren't, I would have gotten rid of them.

The main issue was deciding what to play: Should it be old Ramones material or new material? I had about three albums worth of new material, but I knew that people would rather hear the Ramones songs.

You have to pack as much as you can in an hour or 70 minutes. This time around it was 15 songs, so it was a challenge to get them all the right length so you could get them all on.

You noticed from last night, we only did two from the 80s. And our set's two hours long.

Doing five-minute sets on 'Conan' and things like that are fun and a great way to introduce yourself, but it's such a constricting time, and you usually have to cut bits down.

Oftentimes, I feel like the clock is on, and there's money at stake, and you gotta get up there and dance for grandma, and it better be great, and you better get it right.

We're not one of those bands that throws the names of all their songs in a hat and pulls them out right before they go on stage.

I never want to record something that I'm not proud of just because I think it might be a big hit. There's no positive about that because if you record a song you hate and it's a big hit, then you're singing a song every night that you hate. And if you record a song that you hate and it isn't a hit, then you sold out for no reason.

An average show is two hours. And that's usually right up to the curfew or the union triple time. I always feel like I could have played a little longer or something, but it's hard for me to pay attention to anything for longer than that.

I don't know who was the one that came up with the notion that you have to play the same songs every concert.

Every concert of mine is different in terms of song selection.

There are problems in doing television that have been plaguing me for years. I really like to have a lot of time, to rehearse and make things as good as they can be, but television often doesn't allow for that.

We never do the same set twice... We play for at least two and a half hours, sometimes longer, so there's a lot of songs from all the records. And we know there's a stable we as fans would want to hear, so we always give them, then we change up a bunch of songs and throw in a couple new ones.

Normally, when I write the setlist for a Dream Theater show, I'll change it up every night, and we can basically play whatever we want.

Initially, in starting to pick the songs for the live show, it was really a matter of picking songs that I loved over the years. As far as the album goes, it happened very naturally.

I loved both [Bob] Seger and the Eagles, knowing why they didn't play some of the songs I wanted to hear. But at the same time, they covered all the big bases, and the stuff that most people had heard. But they definitely had a bunch of album cuts that I wanted to hear that they didn't get around to.