Billy Sheehan Quotes

It's not enough to play a song: you have to inhabit it.

I really sing songs that move me. I'm not in show business. I'm in the communications business. That's what it's for me.

Music is not simply an orchestration of something, but it's also not something as trivial as honesty.

I don't know what makes a guy want to write songs and sing, but if you've got a message, you want to get it across. When I come up with an idea about the way I feel, I can really state it strongly in a song.

I go for as much feeling as I can rather than show what I can do up and down the neck. I don't play to show people ability.

Tone has the living soul.

Olivier said that drama is an affair of the heart, or it's nothing, and he was right.

Whatever else has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe. I'm honest.

Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.

For all the acting you can do, the actual soul of someone does somehow permeate through their work.

I think the word soul has gotta come into it. Music that's created just for consuming lacks that soul, that swing, that feeling.

The ideas that you find funny and the things that you are offering to an audience are tied up with who you are and your soul and your heart.

If you're singing, you're telling a story. So to tell it and tell it right, that's it.

Don't play the notes. Play the meaning of the notes.

Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.

Songs are about just being totally honest and putting those words to music.

For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.

Here's the mark that a lot of people miss nowadays. Producers missed. They leave out the heart and soul. And that's what I learned from Sammy Davis, Jr., from Frank Sinatra, is when you went to go see those shows, you got to know them.

If you've got a guitar and a lot of soul, just bang something out and mean it. You're the superstar.

I love deeply, and when it comes to singing love songs and something that I have no problem doing, I put all of my heart and soul into these love songs. I know my fans out there are listening, taking these songs to heart. Like I say, they're relating these songs to their lives, too, and their relationships.

Songwriters tell the truth.

I sing songs that I have lived or I write them because I have lived them. I think the believability factor is key.

When you hear my music and you feel the emotion, it's real. When you see me in a film and you see a tear, it's real.

Music is the way I understand how to communicate now, the way that I've learned how to communicate... but it will eventually have to go beyond that. You see, I've realised that music is not what keeps people involved - it's the attitude behind the music.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.