John Hall Quotes

My friends are mostly familiar with music that plays on the mainstream radio.

When you're listening to radio and hear the same 20 songs over and over and over, you want a break from it. Sometimes you don't want to hear something that sounds just like everything else on the radio. Eventually, if you hear the same sounds and the same musicians and the same mixes and all of that, it will start to sound like elevator music.

Radio stinks. The stations are making a lot of money, but they just aren't taking chances.

Today, music heralds... the establishment of a society of repetition in which nothing will happen anymore.

You give out the words and then sing them. You give out the words, you know, and the people can hear what you're giving out, and they sing that song or that line and they do the same thing again.

I think there's good music out there. I just think that radio stations don't play it.

I think there is a certain perversity in my music in that I continue, you know, to eat at the same ball of vomit year after year.

I'm not crazy about how sort of homogenized pop music become. It used to be much more diverse. Maybe it's just what's played on the radio sounds very much the same.

The effects of good music are not just because it's new; on the contrary music strikes us more the more familiar we are with it.

It's the repetitive thing that brings space. That's one of the things I love secretly about hip-hop. Jazz doesn't have that element. It changes every bar, nothing is ever the same.

The musician who always plays on the same string is laughed at.

Nathan, how can you stand playing the same piece over and over again?" And Grandpa Nate answered, "Why don't you ask me how I can stand making love to the same woman over and over again?

So I'm wearing that today. And I wore it yesterday, too. Maybe I'll wear it tomorrow. I just collect stuff, I guess.

A song ain't nothing but a conversation fixed up to where you can talk it over and over without getting tired of it.

I think the people are just looking for freedom in music...There's a lot of she-bop she-bop going on out there. Maybe they're tired of that same old thing.

A song is a mantra, something you repeat over and over. We need peace, we need giving, we need love, we need unity. I want the whole world to sing this song.

Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells, From the bells, bells, bells.

Day in, day out. That same old voodoo follows me about.

I don't need to be told the same thing every day, every morning, same words.

The way I look at music, what I'm interested in is not necessarily creativity - in many ways I think creativity is overrated, actually. What I think is important is authenticity. I want to hear music that has the resonance of the people. I want to hear music that is an amplification of them. Because then, I can experience the people. But because the music has become so institutionalized, everyone is learning and regurgitating the same material in the same way.

When you do not change up a lot, people may know you a lot better than they should.

I'm bored by repeating myself, and I would imagine that an audience would be bored by me repeating myself.

Their words, like the music, had the potential to be endless.

My life is very monotonous," the fox said. "I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored.

The same old thing--even if it's champagne--is still the same old thing.