Getting into the banjo and discovering that it was an African-American instrument, it totally turned on its head my idea of American music – and then, through that, American history.
Music should be made to make people forget their problems, if only for a short while.
Music is really driving my whole life.
Most artists, you know, you spend their entire lives learning how to play music and write songs, and they don’t really know how the music business works.
But I’m really into old music – bluesy, soulful singers, like Etta James, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin. I wouldn’t have minded being born in the 1960s!
We want to keep doing our own music and show our own colors.
For me, playwriting is and has always been like making a chair. Your concerns are balance, form, timing, lights, space, music. If you don’t have these essentials, you might as well be writing a theoretical essay, not a play.
The character of instrumental music… lets the emotions radiate and shine in their own character without presuming to display them as real or imaginary representations.
Pop music, disco music, and heavy metal music is about shutting out the tensions of life, putting it away.
I don’t intend to stop making music.
It is as absurd to say that a man can’t love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.
We’re thrilled to play an offbeat place. Our music fits with it. I love playing unusual venues.
Music and art and culture is escapism, and escapism sometimes is healthy for people to get away from reality. The problem is when they stay there.
There is no beginning and no end in music. Some people want it to end. But it goes on.
I hate the technological rip-offs that pass for music formats these days, and go back to vinyl to hear a good record because the sound is always so much fuller. I don’t even like listening to music in the car.
Music is so important. Because in Chicago it’s up to us to tell the stories nobody else will.
I was introduced to country music around a campfire on a farm.
Of emotions, of love, of breakup, of love and hate and death and dying, mama, apple pie, and the whole thing. It covers a lot of territory, country music does.
I always preferred to hang out with the outcasts, ‘cause they were cooler; they had better taste in music, for one thing, I guess because they had more time to develop one with the lack of social interaction they had!
Most people can’t see beauty and love. I see our music as medicine.
If you give a good performance, something that gets some feeling across to people, that’s such a rare gift. It’s underestimated at this point in history, when the music biz is inevitably turning into a kind of politics.
I’ve struggled with depression before. For me, music was always a very positive way to will myself out of that situation.
Music is like cooking for me: you mix the ingredients together in one big pan and see how they end up. Through experimenting, you find what you really like and stick with it.
My character in ‘Batman v Superman’ isn’t supposed to be Japanese, but director Zack Snyder said he’d seen me in ‘Wolverine’ and had to get me in the film somehow. Hearing that was like music to my ears.
What I love about ‘Midnight Train’ is that it’s a song about a journey, but the music actually takes you on that journey. It feels like you’re moving through the whole song.
