When you've heard one bagpipe tune, you've heard them both.
Hymn tunes are the nearest we've got to English folk music.
Even in the beginning, when we knew there was a legal argument about how much our song sounds like his song, as one songwriter to another, I wasn't sure that Cat Stevens would take that as bad.
I've liked country music for as long as I can remember, especially the songs of Dolly Parton. Her lyrics are similar to mine: simple, expressive, from the heart. Our voices are in the same kind of register, too.
There is a lot of melody and things that sound familiar in hundreds of songs.
I wear my musical heart on my sleeve and show all my influences off. I'm happy for someone to point out that my song sounds like someone else's.
Erik Satie does not say the opposite of Debussy; he says the same thing only the other way round.
You listen to Handel operas, right? And there are a thousand of them, right? And they all sound alike. If I look back on my work, maybe it's the same thing.
American rock was, and still is to some extent, a closed shop. REO Speedwagon, Toto, Boston, Foreigner all those bands, and I wouldn't be able to tell which from which.
Not that I want to put the entire rap music style down - I just don't like it. And I know somewhere there's gotta be another guy like that. There's gotta be a guy just like that - just like me. There's gotta be somebody, somewhere... Maybe, maybe an assassin type.
I love contrast in music. Being inspired by classical, actually - in high school especially - classical and metal both, I remember having this cool realization that they are really similar. It's just different instrumentation.
Isaac Smith sounded like Curtis Fuller, Corey Hogan sounded like Sonny Rollins, Terrace Martin sounded like Jackie McLean. Already, at 13, 14, 15 years old.
You see, we're influenced by whatever's going. Even if we're not influenced, we're all going that way at a certain time. If we played a Stones record now - and a Beatles record - and we've been way apart, you'd find a lot of similarities. We're all heavy. Just heavy.
I wanted people to say that our music sounds like Porcupine Tree, not that it sounds like King Crimson.
Hey, Christian rock, if you want to be good, stop copying U2. U2 already did it. You know what I mean? There's a lot of U2-esque Christian rock.
I discovered the same thing Gram Parsons did, that soul music and country music are practically identical. Based off of the same chord structures, and the songs are of heartache and loss. The main connection is they both came up in church.
When you're listening to radio and hear the same 20 songs over and over and over, you want a break from it. Sometimes you don't want to hear something that sounds just like everything else on the radio. Eventually, if you hear the same sounds and the same musicians and the same mixes and all of that, it will start to sound like elevator music.
If you take a band like Nirvana, their biggest hits are structurally the same as even a hair metal band's biggest hits. The structure's not different - the attitude was different. Except it really wasn't. It seemed a little more human.
You know, Rolling Stones songs all sound kind of the same.
When I go on and listen to the stuff on the websites, I can't tell, it all sounds like the same band, like they should all be in one band together.
I just feel like bands with the same people, no matter how different the band themselves thinks it is, the listeners go, 'Oh, yeah, it's another Nirvana record.'
I must say it was not very inspiring to see that tons of new bands emerged from nowhere and started to play the exact same music as I did. Why would I want to play this type of music, when tons of other bands did, too?
Listening to a lot of guitar rock and roll music and feeling quite eccentric because everyone expected me to learn and develop like R&B. This kind of made me feel a little bit better, because I realized it was all the same, you know. There's no difference. It's just music.
Inspiration and stealing are two completely different things. If somebody wants to make a song like "Stairway to Heaven" and writes a song on acoustic guitar, Led Zeppelin does not own every song that's on acoustic guitar for the rest of time.
Do you know most of the Jewish songs have the same trend of sadness as Negro spirituals?
