Taj Mahal Quotes

I write things in my house, and hopefully there's a reader out there who enjoys it and has an experience with it, but that's very different than a performer on stage, where there's an immediate dance with the audience. It's incredibly powerful.

When you're a storyteller, part of the process of storytelling is the kind of communion you form with the audience to whom you're telling your story. If some segment of the audience doesn't like that story, it doesn't feel good.

When I sing, I pick out people in the audience and pinpoint on them. So if you feel that I am singing just for you, you may be right!

Part of the gestation of 'The Wall' was this business of alienation from the audience, and so the interesting thing was, what 'The Wall' eventually became was something that absolutely engaged the audience.

You need the audience to go on the ride with you. You can't just isolate them.

Intimacy comes from being yourself on the stage and making the audience feel, without trying, that you're sittin' down there with 'em, playing, and that can happen in a big hall, if you have a good audience that want to listen.

I like trying to create a spark through a collaboration between me and the audience.

I never want to tell a story where I'm lecturing to the audience.

So much about getting onstage is creating a connection with an audience that allows you to go different places and try different things.

I consider each performance to be an intimate conversation between me and the audience members.

I'm a yarn teller. My job is to engage you as much as I can and as often as I can.

It doesn't matter as long as there's interaction between me and the audience. That's why they come.

Playing live is closer to theatre, although when you're up there on your own, it's quite scary and revealing because you're playing your own songs. It's like a one man show that you've written yourself.

I love connecting with the audience, and there's more ways than one to do that.

Many more people saw me on TV than will ever get to see me on stage, but I do love being in the same room as the people I'm telling the story to.

I really enjoy doing the live stuff.

I like performing. I like partnering with an audience.

What is a good performance? It lies in the hands and head of a performer... the shortest way between two people is not a straight line.

I don't use the big video screens that a lot of other artists use because personally, I think it's kind of a crutch. I think sometimes it's like watching television as opposed to really getting involved with what is happening onstage and the people in your section.

I long for an audience. I ache for it. I think that's one of the hardest things about the television medium is that you don't get that. You don't get that immediate response.

I don't know if I ever really considered making a connection with the audience.

I'm not crazy about arenas just because I can sell them out. It doesn't do anything for my ego at all. I want to play places where people don't have to sit in the nosebleed seats and wonder what the hell is going on.

I would play my Dungeons and Dragons songs and watch people's eyes glaze over, and then I would start joking around between songs, and all of a sudden people were lighting up and engaging.

I would love to do more on the stage; having actual contact with the audience is great. You can give them a good seeing to!

From the stage, I can reach a large audience, and you learn from being on stage how much a song reaches, what extent of the crowd a song can reach. I write in a way that can reach most of the audience, but I also wanted to have truly intimate moments as well, many intimate moments, more so than the big moments.