Emotional Expression Through Music Quotes

I have insanely dorky taste. Basically, if you're a woman, and you're under any kind of emotional duress, and you sing a song, I will listen to it forever. It's odd being a 37-year-old heterosexual male who owns nothing but Sarah McLachlan and Tori Amos. But I'll go against that at first and play something boring like James Taylor.

I feel like my music is just an extension of my acting. I treat the songs like scenes that tell a story... it's very similar.

When scoring a film, empathy is the key. And it is just as important to use music to express the actors' emotions as it is to move the audience.

It was pitch dark. I could hear only the violin, and it was as though Juliek's soul were the bow. He was playing his life. The whole of his life was gliding on the strings--his last hopes, his charred past, his extinguished future. He played as he would never play again...When I awoke, in the daylight, I could see Juliek, opposite me, slumped over, dead. Near him lay his violin, smashed, trampled, a strange overwhelming little corpse.

I get told I'm a confessional songwriter, which gets on my tits because I think of negative connotations attached to the word "confessional". I don't like the idea of songwriting being therapy. I don't want to put myself so directly in the foreground.

A song to me is a very tangible thing. I can feel it with my hands and see it with my eyes.

But what she was really trying to say was this: I like music better than anything in the world, after you.

My first boyfriend that I ever had, actually sang a song that he wrote for me on-stage to ask me out. That was pretty romantic.

I write my miserable songs. I write songs about disgust and self-pity. We’re all going to have bummer moments. That’s not the stuff I choose to share.

I don't think rock music has any positive function.

I don't talk about my personal life in great detail. I write about it in my songs, and I feel like you can share enough about your life in your music to let people know what you're going through.

They all trying to say something with music that you can't say with plain talk. There ain't really no words for love or pain. And the way I see it, only fools go around trying to talk their love or talk their pain. So the smart people make music and you can kinda hear about it without them saying anything.

We were quiet on the car ride home. I turned on the radio and found a station playing "Hey Jude." It was true, I didn't want to make it bad. I wanted to take the sad song and make it better. It's just that I didn't know how.

I may be prejudiced, but I believe that jazz music has the strongest healing potential, and it's not just because I play it and love it so much. I feel that it's the improvisation in jazz that makes it so strong as a healing tool, what each individual gives to a tune from their heart and their soul when they take a solo. It's all spontaneous, and it's all love, and from the heart.

Listen to this, Nimit. Follow Coleman Hawkins' improvised lines very carefully. He is using them to tell us something. Pay very close attention. He is telling us the story of the free spirit that is doing everything it can to escape from within him. That same kind of spirit is inside me, inside you. There-you can hear it, I'm sure: the hot breath, the shivering heart. (Thailand)

I want my music to be able to tell a story about what I've experienced and what I think my fans will be able to understand also.

My mother was a champion Irish dancer and singer and most of my family were musical, particularly in Irish dancing. Music is all about spewing out your emotions. A mixture of a good tune and a good beat and everyone playing their guts out and something that grabs people's attention.

Music doesn't hurt anybody, that's what's amazing. Everything is in there, every kind of human emotion, from the darkest to the lightest. And it has power. Unbelievable power.

Forgetfulness heals everything and song is the most beautiful manner of forgetting, for in song man feels only what he loves.

The music is the imperative. It has the upper hand. I think all music, even though it's an abstraction, does motivate a particular meaning. Then it's the job of the musician to honor that meaning and to somehow implement lyrical material that can accommodate that emotional environment.

There were so many different influences in my life: being half Mexican and half Irish, growing up an only child of immigrant parents, being bullied in school, feeling alienated and lonely, this undertone of darkness. All that culminated and came out in my music and made it different.

It's very difficult for me to say 'I love you' but to sing 'I love you' for me is easier.

It was by music that the ancient kings gave elegant expression to their joy. By their armies and axes they gave the same to their anger.

I learned from my teachers but became through my music

That's why I played music; my social skills were limited. I think a lot of people that experience that pick up guitars, because they can't communicate otherwise.