Musical Awakening Quotes

When I was around 11, my dad took me to see Santana live, and then I got 'Sacred Fire,' and everything changed for me.

Hearing the blues changed my life.

I wanted to be a composer before anything else. And my sister was listening to Led Zeppelin in the other room! When I heard that, it was a game-changer.

And, so, when I picked up the guitar, suddenly, just playing a couple of notes really, really spoke to me. It was almost like I should have been doing it prior to that. You know, it was something that just felt really natural.

It wasn't until I got out of the Army and I heard Coltrane's record 'Coltrane,' when he was doing 'Inch Worm' and 'Out of This World,' that I thought, 'Oh my God, you can do that?' And then I thought, 'OK, I better go back and listen to Eric Dolphy a bit.' And then I said, 'Hmm, I better pull out these Ornette Coleman records.'

The music of Hendrix wakes people up to their possibilities. It's more than just dreaming about being a guitar hero.

When I heard Bjork's debut, that was when I first realized that I could be a singer, even with my unusual voice.

I'll tell you what's crazy: Nobody in my family is musically inclined, no form, fashion, anything. I always had some type of connection to music though. This was long before I ever knew that I could sing, or I ever even tried to start singing. It was something different, man, it made me feel some type of way.

Jack Bruce, as soon as I saw him, it changed me. I didn't even know what bass players did until I saw Cream.

I didn't understand that I could sing until I was like 11 or 12. My mom heard me singing around the house and she said, What are you doing? You really can sing! So then I started going to school and singing to the girls.

The first time I listened to jazz was when I was 8.

When I made my way across childhood to the tinny AM radio, it was dark. Lights out. I listened intently. More intently than I ever had before. Something was speaking to my unformed-ness like a long lost friend. Something that I had never met but forgotten nonetheless. I was 'realizing' that music was 'different' from other things in life.

Often a single experience will open the young soul to music for a whole lifetime

The alarm in the morning? Well, I have an old tape of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a perfectly transcendent version in Shubert's seventh symphony. And I've rigged it up so that at exactly 7:30 every morning it falls from the ceiling onto my face.

My dad bought a Beatles tape when I was in fifth grade, and that was the first time I ever really - I mean I was into music, but that was the first time it really blew my mind. When I heard the 'Red Compilation,' which wasn't like a proper album, I thought, 'music was more than I had ever thought it was before.'

The craziest thing is I didn't know I could sing like this - ever. My voice has changed, or I've grown into it, woken up.

I realized by using the high notes of the chords as a melodic line, and by the right harmonic progression, I could play what I heard inside me. That's when I was born.

I started writing poetry when I was 12 years old and also undertook vocal training since a young age. However, it was only during my time at the University of Oxford did the musician in me came alive.

I think I was first awakened to musical exploration by Dizzy Gillespie and Bird. It was through their work that I began to learn about musical structures and the more theoretical aspects of music.

I don't really know how to describe how I got into music - it kind of just happened.

I've been blessed enough to have my eyes open because of music, first and foremost.

It was stumbling on to really the bible of the blues, you know, and a very powerful drug to be introduced to us and I absorbed it totally, and it changed my complete outlook on music.

All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments. It is not the violins and the cornets-it is not the oboe nor the beating drums, nor the score of the baritone singer singing his sweet romanza-nor that of the women's chorus; it is nearer and farther than they.

Even though I was a rock 'n' roll fan, hearing the raw blues was like listening to music on a much deeper kind of level.

The best music is the music which brings out something of you that you didn't know was there before, or you did know was there but had avoided.