Musical Reinvention Quotes

There are a lot of people holding on to the old Jessie J - whatever that means - but I think there's a lot more people realizing what I'm about. I think people like it.

David Bowie emerged as a rock star in the late '60s. And as Ken Tucker wrote, "In the face of the hippy era's sincerity, intimacy and generosity, Bowie presented irony, distance and self-absorption. His song 'Changes' announced the arrival of a new counterculture," unquote.

The greatest thing about me is I have always been able to reinvent. We have done that about three or four times with my sound.

I'm not giving up my history and what I've done in my music because I love it and I'm very proud of it. I just want to open it up for more people.

After 10 years, I have been touring for 20, playing basically the same type of music, a four-piece or three-piece type of music with loud, crashing drums and screaming vocals. It gets to the point where you're looking for something new, and you don't want to do something that's way too left-field, for fear that it might seem contrived.

I'm 39, and I would like to be able to make great pop music for another 20 years. And it feels like creating a sort of inanimate blond bob and allowing other people to play the role of the pop singer, it affords me a little bit more freedom in terms of my expiration date.

I wouldn't want to cover a Hank Williams song in a country-western way. It doesn't occur to me instinctually to re-create productions. I'm interested in re-creating songs. Putting different clothes on them.

What I do is I basically make records to please myself first and foremost, and so one of the most important things for me as a musician and a writer and a producer is to feel like there's always a sense of evolution and reinvention with each record.

My daughter wasn't into that type of rock music and kind of played it off. But then these teenage boys started coming around, and Led Zeppelin, I don't know, it became reinvented. Now she's very proud of her grandfather.

Some people say Bowie is all surface style and second-hand ideas, but that sounds like a definition of pop to me.

I love rethinking and reimagining songs.

I think remixes give songs more life.

Songs from the theatre can be taken and put on record in a commercial and contemporary way, be reinvented and become standout tracks on their own.

I found my sound early on. Look at U2: they haven't changed their music for 20 years. Anyway, many people come unstuck when they try to change what they do and what they are known for.

A lot of artists talk about getting out of their comfort zones and being the most proud of their newest album. But it is true for me. I rethought a lot of what I do.

My only general rule was to steer away from things I played with the band over the past couple of tours. I was interested in re-shaping the Rising material for live shows, so people could hear the bare bones of that.

Sometimes an artist is lost and needs to find a new direction for himself or his music.