I've always sung. My dad had a song in his heart and on his lips 24/7. A lot of the time, it was the same song and the same phrase over and over again.
Studying music involves a lot of mathematics and a lot of exercises of memory. Or you've got to be able to be like somebody, to play like somebody, to play Mozart's music the way he played it and how he intended it. You've got to make it perfect, and that's not what I want to do. Although it is beautiful.
Melodies die out, like the pipe of Pan, with the ears that love them and listen for them.
It's really weird to be playing chords again. Haven't played chords for a long time. I realised I haven't played chord changes since OK Computer and stuff like that.
I always did each show for about two years. So if you play the music, it just comes back to me.
When I was eight, my piano teacher played seven or eight notes, and I sang them. She stopped and looked at me in shock! That was the first time I'd gotten that reaction. I'd had looks of horror, but never shock in a positive way.
Elvis' songs will always be there, and I hope mine will be after I'm gone.
The accordion was the first instrument I played, when I was 7 years old.
If there is no music, I will perish. While I have not learnt music, I can play the tune that comes into my head on the keyboard.
I've always been talented, always been able to sing or remember a song after hearing it one time.
My parents didn't have records, they didn't have radios, and they didn't listen to music. My grandmother was my main connection to art and music. She could play piano very well, and she had perfect pitch.
I get like a melody that comes up and I try to write it down or record it. Hum it into a tape recorder or write it down on some manuscript paper. It could happen at any time, on the road or off the road, but mostly, you know, at home.
Music always lived with me, like a family tradition.
If you are speaking about my own songs, I would think so because we were talking about that particular era and I was singing one of my songs that I recorded 50 years ago.
When I'm playing live, I'll rip out a ballad from my album, and I'll play that solo on the piano, which feels really good because it kind of takes me back to when I was younger.
I don't think I think when I play. I have a photographic memory for chords, and when I'm playing, the right chords appear in my mind like photographs long before I get to them.
Very few of the men whose names have become great in the early pioneering of jazz and of swing were trained in music at all. They were born musicians: they felt their music and played by ear and memory. That was the way it was with the great Dixieland Five.
One of my favorite things is when people will ask for a song that I hadn't planned to play. It is really fun to see if you can remember something, and you don't always. I mean, sometimes it's just crash and burn.
'Lucky Man' I wrote when I was twelve years old. I wrote it when I first was given a guitar by my mother. I only knew four chords, but I used them all to write that song. And it just stayed with me, stayed in my head. I didn't even write it on a piece of paper. I remembered it.
I just write... I follow the melodies that I can't forget/the ones that pop up in my brain the most.
Sing with me, sing for the years. Sing for the laughter'n sing for the tears.
I have a good ear for music.
I remember learning how to play 'The Fool On The Hill' on piano when I was in maybe fifth grade.
I really love that song. I love when people cover songs that are familiar but have been kind of forgotten about. So when you play it, it takes people back to a certain place. That's what I wanted for 'Torn.'
I've actually had a melody on my guitar since the day I learned how to play it, back when I was 7. And for some reason I can't add lyrics to it.
