Musical Failure Quotes

I play the drums really, really badly.

What's cool about indie rock is that one band can do effectively the same thing as another band, and one band nails it, and the other one doesn't. I like that elusiveness.

I sang "O Holy Night" in a school choir. My mother came and listened to me and complimented me. So that was the high point. I cannot sing a note.

One time, when I was in my teens, jamming in a Kansas City club, I was doing all right until I tried doing double tempo on 'Body and Soul.' Everybody fell out laughing. I went home and cried and didn't want to play again for three months.

I tried to play bass in a punk band once, and it was an absolute disaster. I can’t play anything. I don’t know what it is.

After so many attempts to mount a musical version of 'Lolita,' the project was well and truly dead by the summer of 1971. Chief among those relieved: Vladimir Nabokov.

The songs of mine that don't work, the ones that I wouldn't consider playing live for instance, fail to integrate their idiosyncracies. It's not that they fail because they're boring, but because they overreach.

You sounded like someone who should be singing on a cruise ship. Halfway through your song, I wished the ship was sinking.

I wanted to play saxophone, but all I could get were a few squeaks.

There's two kinds of rock n' roll casualty: the one that has huge success and adoration, and then suddenly it stops. Or there's when you're in a band: it is all-consuming, so then you have the dream of that, and then the dream's taken away from you even before it happens.

I lasted one night. They said my playing spoiled people's appetites.

Folk musicians have a lot of the same self-importance, but they're way more cruel and jealous than rock musicians - I know this for a fact because I used to be a folk musician.

I'm a failed percussionist, you see.

Our first album didn't work because we tried to be something we're not.

I'm a horrible musician, but I've been fortunate enough to play great songs.

You know, they wanted to do a Broadway album and every show was kind of a bomb. There was no music at all.

The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.

You can expect nothing in being a musician, and you have to be just very thankful every time it goes positively for you.

My wife Elizabeth and I started The Really Terrible Orchestra for people like us who are pretty hopeless musicians who would like to play in an orchestra. It has been a great success. We give performances; we've become the most famous bad orchestra in the world.

When I tried to play characters that strayed from who I am it ended in disaster. People didn't expect me in comedies or musicals.

You have to be willing to deal with the ups and downs of the music, the ups and downs of the audience.

I failed music when I was a teenager.