Musical Immersion Quotes

Time becomes a stutter-the space between drumbeats, splintered into fragments, and also endlessly long, as long as soaring guitar notes that melt into one another, as full as the dark mass of bodies around me. I feel like the air downstairs has gone to liquid, to sweat and smell and sound, and I have broken apart in it. I am wave: I am pulled into the everything. I am energy and noise and a heartbeat going boom, boom, boom, echoing the drums.

I gave myself over to music and art a long time ago, so I don't get to relax and I don't get to sit still. The best I can do is constantly create my own environment so it benefits what I need to accomplish in the next step.

When I write, it's intimate. I write in the car, and I don't even hear, like, ambulances driving past me because I'm in my car, listening to the music, writing. I record in an attic with no booth. It's not like I'm in the dark with candles, but it's like a house, a home, and I record like that. I think that plays into the music.

That's why I hate to get started in these jam sessions. I'm always the last one to leave.

If I had the money, I would love to open up a movie theater that just played images and colors and beautiful music. For me, there's nothing like listening to a beautiful opera sometimes - on a record or seeing it live - just to be sleepy and let those beautiful voices take me somewhere I've never been before.

Music is my life. The things that people do don't seem interesting to me at all - going out to bars, carrying on, going to parties. What the hell do people do? Shop? Play golf? Have vacations? That doesn't seem interesting to me. To me, my job as a musician is to be a good receptor. A lot of music comes through me.

Music is really everything I know. To be honest every experience I've ever had has been brought up from music and everything I do is because of music. I don't know anything else, I think about music before I go to sleep and it just really is everything that I am.

You know, many people do not know that I am so immersed when it comes to music. I have such a huge knowledge of music. I like my songs, I like my melodies, my harmonies, you know.

Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It's not an occupation or profession, it's a compulsion.

Any true musician, true artist, knows that when they're in that point of total artistic creation, whether on stage or in the studio or writing or whatever, that's the closest moment [to creation]. And that's what keeps all these people addicted to getting back to that moment again.

How we absorb music is unique. I know what I do. When I'm listening to music, I tend to find myself in a song. That's what really makes you connect is if you feel what that song is saying.

Music is something that even when you close your eyes it gets into your body.

Oh, you happy sons of the North who have been reared at the bosom of Bach, how I envy you!

When I am most successful as a guitar player is when I'm able to just sort of lose myself. You stop thinking about technique or anything like that and just trying to evoke the emotion of that song brings, which is a very strong emotion for me.

Me, I've concentrated on music pretty much to the exclusion of other things.

Surrender your whole being to a note, and gravity disappears...wi th one chord

Music should be an elective experience. You should go, "I'm going to sit down and listen to some Beethoven, by God," and then you get to hear it.

I get so into playing the bass. The only time I ever feel the same way is when I'm having sex; it's the epitome of unifying with something.

I have no ear for music. When I attend a concert, I endeavor gamely to follow the sequence and relationship of sounds but cannot keep it up for more than a few minutes. Visual impressions, reflections of hands in lacquered wood, a diligent bald spot over a fiddle, take over, and soon I am bored beyond measure by the motions of the musicians.

When you listen to an album, it shouldn't feel like, "That's the girl song," "That's the club song." I shouldn't know what you're thinking while you're making the song. I don't want to know what the artist is thinking.

Think about a piece of music - some great symphony - we don't expect it to get better as it develops, or that its whole purpose is to reach the final crescendo. The joy is found in listening to the music in each moment.

Music gets inside you, music captures you. Music becomes your heartbeat. It’s a drug and makes you feel whatever the song’s about.

I think you can move to everything, but with some music, you just want to sit still. That's me, anyway.

My goal is to be one with the music. I just dedicate my whole life to this art.