Musical Shift Quotes

I always think that, for me, being someone who comes out of electric guitar experimentation, the idea of playing acoustic guitar is, in itself, kind of a radical move.

My main focus now is playing the guitar. I'm not really like, dancing on stage anymore.

'Superunknown' was one of the most dramatic shifts in what we were doing musically. I don't think I realized it at the time.

Just a lot of those bands [like The Blue Jean Committee] started off in blues, and then they all transformed into other kinds.

First, it doesn't surprise me that traditional music has experienced a kind of exhaustion in the 20th century - not forgetting that many musicians started to look outside the traditional structures of tonality.

I had already done Rainbow in Curved Air and had a big record on CBS. I was launched to have a long career and then I just dropped out and went to India.

I will stop nasal singing. I will change if the time comes. I am 100% sure about it. The day I feel people are loving some different kind of music, I will opt for it and change myself.

I was 21, and I was like, "Man, am I really gonna start over and try this whole thing over again? Do I want to start over and be in a rock band again and try to act like a 17-year-old for as long as I can?" Because that was what I was doing with Simon Dawes band. I decided that if I was going to go on playing music, I was going to try and work on it. So I got into Leonard Cohen and Will Oldham, guys that really inspired me not only as songwriters but also through their music as people, and that's kind of what the shift was for me.

In the early '70s, I started to feel like Philadelphia soul was the black-sheep brother of rock and roll. I decided to try to get away from it.

Obviously, this is a huge change with the advent of Lindsey Buckingham not being a part of Fleetwood Mac. We all wish him well and all the rest of it.

Of Montreal's early releases were loaded with playful but confessional acoustic tunes, but the band soon embraced glam-rock's freakier side on albums like 'Hissing Fauna Are You the Destroyer?' and 'Skeletal Lamping.' It was a shift fans might not have tolerated if it weren't for frontman Kevin Barnes' catchy, personality-driven songs.

I don't want people to expect the hard tracks to continue my whole career. When I started making music, I wasn't making music like that.

But of course it's different now, the blues is no longer blues, it's green now.

I came from being a singer going into jazz. And that's one of the things that polio did for me is it took away my ability to sing with a range because it paralyzed my vocal chords, so that was when I started playing. But I hear the music as if I were singing even when I am playing.

The guitar has become a textural instrument rather than a lead instrument. And I think that's probably a good thing.

I'll tell you sort of an odd story: My music taste changed on 9/11. And it's very strange. I actually intellectually find this very curious. But on 9/11, I didn't like how rock music responded. And country music collectively, the way they responded, it resonated with me.

I played Big Band jazz music. I wasn't into rock and roll. I was just there because it was a living. I surprised everyone. I'm still surprising people.

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