Musical Hierarchy Quotes

I am regarded as a usurper, as an imposter and dilettante, because I do technically come from the wrong side of the tracks in musical terms.

I always resented the role of a drummer as nothing more than a subservient figure.

I guess, from the beginning, Thurston and Kim were the dominant singers in the band, and although I was singing in bands previously, I guess I mainly deferred to them a lot in terms of who was singing the bulk of the songs.

The drum is surely the lord of music, is it not?

We like to categorize things into showy things and deep things, you know, and things that are high music - important music - and shallow music. And I think that's dangerous, because there's often a mix of both.

I know Ornette was playing violin sometimes - that was his bridge into the classical world, to break up that whole pecking order.

When the band first formed, everybody had been sidemen. So they said, 'In this band there are no sidemen,' and when I joined the band, it was still the same. There were some power struggles emerging, because Henley and Frey had sung all the hits at that point.

In the hierarchy of instruments, if you're a harpist, you're considered someone with a brain much more than if you're a singer.

The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics.

When you're a little kid, you just like music that makes you happy and is fun. As you get older, you reach college or your 20s and you decide that music should be challenging and all art should be smart. So you start to think it makes you like high art more to put down things you consider low art. I don't even think things are low art.

Opening for certain acts after so many years of headlining obviously made us resentful. It was kind of hard watching all these bands, who I really believed didn't deserve to be on top musically, going ahead and pushing us out.

It's probable that in the artistic hierarchy birds are the greatest musicians existing on our planet.

In the hierarchy of instruments, if you're a harpist, you're considered someone with a brain much more than if you're a singer. Even though singers, particularly singers who can play piano... If you go to the office of career development, you can get a gig much easier. Still, musicians tend to look down on you. I think they've got some nerve, because if they could sing, they would do it, but most of them can't.