Music Identity Quotes

I always hated how I looked on camera. I never put a face to my music, which actually made the music that much more mysterious.

With 'Minecraft,' I've started creating serene ambiance music. As the game went on to become famous, people started identifying me as the ambient music person, which I never actually thought I was.

I'm really proud of 'Bright Lights' because I was still in the mind frame of my first album when I was putting it together, but next time I want to display something different. I don't want to be as young, immature and all about boys!

Society wants to categorize everything, but to me it's all African-American music.

I'm not committed to putting myself up for a blues guitarist, even though I love playing the blues.

What I believe to be jazz is constructed and improvised music which is in the air right now. But I don't think that's most people's definition of jazz, you know? We don't know what we're talking about, because we don't know the definition.

I've never really considered myself a musician.

When I think about country music, I think about America.

Part of the punk attitude was that you should project your music through your whole body... show your personality as much as possible.

R&B is my home. It's who I am. It's who I've been. It's the first genre I fell in love with. It's the reason why I've been able to do other genres of music.

Music is all I know.

Alternative R&B is in my soul. It's not going anywhere.

My music is a whole reflection of who I'm as an individual.

Hip-hop kind of absorbed rock in terms of the attitude and the whole point of why rock was important music. Young people felt like rock music was theirs, from Elvis to the Beatles to the Ramones to Nirvana. This was theirs; it wasn't their parents'. I think hip-hop became the musical style that embraces that mentality.

Our music did not sound like the Beatles in any way, shape or form. I could never find it in myself to use those Beatles tricks in Styx records because they were sacred to me. But what they did always influenced my thinking.

Am I R&B because I'm black? Am I pop because I have a song called 'Milkshake'? Or can I just be who the hell I am? Good Lord, people make it seem like we're doing heart transplants here, but we're just making music!

I do get credit for having a California sound to my music, but I don't think people really know what that means - they think the Beach Boys. I'm thinking more like Sunset Strip in the 1960s and stuff like that.

When I started out, everyone seemed to be adopting these names... Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious. I wasn't really Rotten or Vicious or Nasty, so I wanted something a bit more funny - yet something that seemed real rock 'n' roll... something that acknowledged my ambition.

I wouldn't use a song I didn't think was my brand or image.

Here's where it goes with Led Zeppelin. It didn't matter what was going on around us, because the character of Led Zeppelin's music was so strong.

I don't like new bands. I don't want to be one of those pathetic old men in their forties who knows exactly what 18-year-olds are into.

At one time they've been the most important thing to me. So I can't hear our records on the radio, I can't stand it, because they sound so out of what everyone else is doing.

A lot of people get into alternative music as part of their identity. It's something that isn't the mainstream, that their brothers and sisters don't know about, and that their parents don't like. It's something they can have as their own.

When my first album came out, it wasn't Bollywood.

I was kind of a sideman. Then I became kind of a singer-songwriter.