Musical Uncertainty Quotes

I'm a panicked karaoke participant because I am always searching for a song in the moment. I don't have my go to song. I will be driving along and I will be like, "That should be my karaoke song!" and then I forget what song it is.

I have a really hard time writing my own lyrics for this record, because one, I had to write so many and also I was kind of perplexed by the idea of how I was going to sing and play... because at that time, we hadn't really thought about asking someone else.

I have a very difficult time describing my music. Because I run into people in the hardware store and they go, 'Oh, you're a musician. So what kind of music do you play?' And I go, 'Uh, I've been doin' this for many years - I don't know what to call it.'

"Rock Candy" was my first record. I had never been in a studio, so I was in shock and I had no idea if it was great or if it stunk. I was just putting in my heart and soul, and closing my eyes and keeping my fingers crossed. I gave it everything.

I had no idea what those cords were in the bridge of 'Prisoner In Disguise' when I wrote them. I had to go over to Don Gorman, the piano player, and ask what in the world I was playing.

The technology is good and it's bad. You know what you're dealing with out there musically, but my head stops at this electronic stuff. I don't quite know what I'm dealing with out there yet.

If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void.

I look at my clarinet sometimes and I think, I wonder what's going to come out of there tonight? You never know.

I honestly don't have like a person that I wanna work with. I'm just always focused on me, and I'm still trying to figure out my sound and what I wanna do. So I'm never really looking for features or something.

I was 13 years old. I feel like I didn't have a sense of artistry, and I didn't have a sense of the music that I wanted to make, and every time I'd go into the studio, and I'd make my EP, a month later I'd scrap it and be like, 'I hate every song. I don't wanna do it.' Because that's how 13-year-olds are.

He [Thelonious Monk] played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

My version of a stress dream is, really, showing up on a concert stage with a drum set and not knowing the chart.

There are always some doubts when you do a new album though. You wonder whether you succeeded or not, especially when you waited as long as I did for this one - seven years. You're never really sure if it will be a nice record or not.

The entire making of 'Within and Without' was a series of experiments and trial by error. When I started writing, I didn't have a strong idea of what the record was going to end up like.

It's just about pushing yourself to realms that are uncharted. I love to get to that place where I don't know what kind of music I'm doing, I don't know if it's any good, I don't know if it's anything. It's a big question mark. The idea is to have interesting results. That's my bottom line. Not just a creative fantasy world or something like that, but a mood too.

I like living on that edge, musically. I like a bit of insecurity and that feeling of not really knowing what's going to happen.