Musical Depth Quotes

When I first heard Bob Dylan, I'll be honest, I didn't like him. But I was shallow of mind and didn't understand the poetry. I just judged him on his singing and his guitar playing.

People in Ireland take in the whole song. After a long history of great singers and songwriters and poets, they are able to consume the entire song - not just the external; they go inside.

I'm really maturing into soul music. It's not my attempt or karaoke try. I feel like I really embody the music now that I am 36.

I love to musicalize things. You do employ a whole level of gravity. You use the emotional heft of music.

Music is wonderful. Especially if there's some kind of content to it.

Not to be mean about it, but some great rock and rollers, like Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry, are pretty one-dimensional.

I'm not a pop act, churning stuff out really quickly. I find the music that arises from that style of working is distracted, not particularly profound.

There's this Bruno Mars guy. I met him in Hawaii when was doing Elvis imitations at the age of about five or six years old. There's a lot of old school in him. He's got a depth that I just love.

Music is the silence between the notes.

The value of jazz still has to be clarified. People involve themselves with its superficialities without digging for its soul.

I wouldn't want to hear Beethoven without beautiful bass, the cellos, the tuba. It's very important. Hip-hop has thunderous bass. And so does Beethoven. If you don't have the bass, it's like being amputated. It's like you have no legs.

I know I'm not the kind of person who's gonna wind up a walking jukebox, like many rock 'n' roll artists. They just play their hits and that's it. That doesn't appeal to me.

In Bach, Beethoven and Wagner we admire principally the depth and energy of the human mind; in Mozart, the divine instinct.

I like the songs to appear very simple and to flow by without any kind of hiccup, but there has to be this impression of other currents underneath. Like if the songs aren't, on some level, multidimensional, we lose interest in them.

Nirvana is next level. The songs are really cool to connect with on a more mature level, and I don't think I really understood that when I was 15.

While Paul Simon is revered, I don't think people get how deep he is. I love the guy. He comes from that early street-harmony, first-generation type of rock and rollers. He gets it.

It's difficult to explain exactly how I react to music, but if it makes me feel anything at all, then I'll have some kind of emotional relationship to it. That's what defines good music to me - if it makes me truly feel something.

It's really deep to me. Although it seems to many people that I'm making silly music, I'm really serious.

Peter Cooper looks at the world with an artist's eye and a human heart and soul. His songs are the work of an original, creative imagination, alive with humor and heartbreak and irony and intelligence, with truth and beauty in the details. Deep stuff. And they get better every time you listen to them.

Too many times you come across lyrics that sound like you've heard them before or you can't really relate to them. And I think that I write songs that sound fresh and sensual in kind of a layered, lush way. But I also think that they are real, and that's why I wanted to call the record 'Inside Out.'

For me personally, Elliott Carter was and remains one of the most meaningful composers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries because he represents substance. He was the living proof of uncompromising, complex music, which at first seems inaccessible. But it becomes accessible if one digs in and sees the development through.

My goal is to live the truly religious life, and express it in my music. If you live it, when you play there's no problem because the music is part of the whole thing. To be a musician is really something. It goes very, very deep. My music is the spiritual expression of what I am - my faith, my knowledge, my being.

The voice is like a man, like ourselves: we all feel melancholic about what we have lost, the things we could do when we were young. But having the possibility to still perform is wonderful. The voice loses elasticity as you age, but on the other hand, maybe you are more mature as an interpreter, maybe your approach to singing deepens.

The music that I make is built on layers upon layers of musical ideas. I want to keep it fun and fresh to where listeners won't get everything from just one listen. They can go back to it months, weeks, or even years later and hear something that they didn't ever hear before. That's what it's all about.

When I walked into the studio, the chorus of 'Nobody Love' was already set. For me, the challenge was to make it have depth.