Music Limitations Quotes

I think it's hard to really write a song that will educate someone because songs are meant to be ... you don't want to be too didactic in a song because it doesn't make for good music. And I think the role of songs can be to inspire people but there needs to education and prose to back that up.

I love radio, but it's a very limited thing today. Everything has to be edited down to 3:59, and too bad if I didn't make my statement in three minutes and 59 seconds. Everybody's song has to make its point so quickly.

I still don't know how to express the really delicate personal stuff. People think that Plastic Ono is very personal, but there are some subtleties of emotions which I cannot seem to express in pop music, and it frustrates me. Maybe that's why I still search for other ways of expressing myself. Song writing is a limiting experience in some ways - writing down words that have to rhyme.

I can't play my songs on the smaller harp. I have a Celtic harp. I can't do the key changes.

When I put out 'Same Thing In Reverse,' I was told categorically that this will never get played in America.

Music can't change the world.

A girl can't sing rock & roll too well. It's basically too savage.

Since music has never had a Rembrandt, we have remained nothing more than musicians.

I end up pleading my case to alternative programmers - you're telling me that my music is too dark for pop, too pop for alternative, and urban radio won't touch it - so we have a record that doesn't fit in. And what is more alternative than that?

A song is not going to change this damn world. Instead of making people mad about this shitty situation, it's going to make everybody happy. It's a false thing. It's like a lullaby as opposed to a gun. People need to be slapped into reality and music just doesn't do that.

People keep putting limitations on themselves and creating this reality that soul music is dead. That's only in their reality. It's not true. To me, Adele is R&B. Bruno Mars is R&B. It's just good songwriting and songs. That is going to last.

There's more to life than listening to rock music.

There's this notion that music has to be confined to some small, simple place to be popular, something I never believed.

They think the banjo can only be happy, but that's not true.

But, in fairness to them, too, the popular song per se is really a pretty shallow medium to perform in.

I don't know any songs. People have asked me to play a song, and I say, "I don't know anything."

There are many singers who have got an exceptional talent, but spend their lives singing in local trains or hotels. Does the country even know who they are? Music in India is restricted only to Bollywood. Whoever manages to make a mark there is remembered. The ones who fail to reach and make it big there are forgotten.