We started off as a garage band who played a lot of rock 'n' roll.
There is no line of demarcation between the amateurs and the pros; everyone is using the same tactics and playing in the same arenas. The only thing that separates them is radio, but the artist doesn't control who goes to radio and who doesn't.
Mixtapes are always small scale to me - they never get taken seriously, and they're always short-lived.
I doubt I'll ever pay someone to do a remix again, because there's some amazing stuff just coming out of bedrooms.
I used to go to open mics in New York when I was starting out, and it was mostly just people who wanted an audience to look at them for eight minutes on a stage.
I'm not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down.
It's very common in Iceland, this music-making and artistic expression by non-professionals. The brass band tradition is not as big, but there are choirs everywhere. So that's something that is familiar to me.
They call me before they go into production, when they have a prototype, and they call legitimate saxophonists, too. As opposed to the other kind.
At fourteen or fifteen, I decided to earn my living when I grew up playing drums made from wooden beer kegs and leading a group called Keg Brando and His Kegliners. We organized a little band, but it didn't last long and didn't make any money.
I go to more open mic nights than open mikers.
There were a lot of gifted amateurs in my day. Most of the kids now play fantastically well. I think there are so many bands around now who might get there, but it's a tougher journey.
We never thought we were musicians. We just thought we were in a band.
I played in a couple of really crummy bands, including one in the dorm I was in at MIT, for a year or two.
What made 'American Idol' different from 'The Voice' and all these other singing competitions... 'American Idol' just gave regular old normal people like me and like Trent a chance.
I've seen some beyond-amazing performers do karaoke who should be on stage somewhere, and I've seen people who you rather didn't enter the bar. That's the beautiful thing about it; it's for everybody.
I watch films. I play the guitar: me and some mates - I wouldn't dignify it with the term band - get together and play.
Hell is full of musical amateurs.
The music we made then was so amateurish, compared to the rest of mainstream pop or rock and roll. But what differentiated us from what everybody else was doing in the business was the fact that you could tell that these people came from different reference areas.
I don't like playing to guitar players, actually. I'd rather just play to ordinary people.
Music is too important to be left to professionals.
My wife Elizabeth and I started The Really Terrible Orchestra for people like us who are pretty hopeless musicians who would like to play in an orchestra. It has been a great success. We give performances; we've become the most famous bad orchestra in the world.
I started out singing in high school in the choir and in a garage band.
I grew up in a musical family, but nobody was a professional musician.
We started out as a bar band. We were sometimes playing in front of 20 people.
I would never inflict my bassoon on anybody really other than the long suffering audiences that come to the concerts of The Really Terrible Orchestra; which actually is really terrible.
