Oliver Sykes Quotes

The songs in 'Wonderland' don't have a melodic life for me - I'm not a musical person - but they have an emotional life, an emotional echo perhaps.

Poetry is emotion, passion, love, grief - everything that is human. It is not for zombies by zombies.

Truly to sing, that is a different breath.

Even if you're playing Brahms or a Beethoven concerto, you've got to have a different vantage point, slightly, each time.

I realized that equipment really had little to do with why I sound like the way I sound.

Feelings are like a color chart that God has given us.

Rock & roll is not about what you play, it's about how you play it.

It's impossible to play a run with as much feeling as a single note. I've never been so much into runs as making single notes cry.

Mozart would play a counterpart with his left hand while using his right to mock it. It was blue, dark, shadowy - and it made me feel something. That's when I realized music was inside me.

I believe that my music is just about feelings, and the style is just a side effect.

To enjoy my music, you need depth and emotionality.

The art of interpretation is not to play what is written.

I think people appreciate a songwriter who shows different sides. The whole angst thing is cool, but if that's all you've got, it's just boring. Everything I write, whether it's happy or sad, has a sense of humor to it.

If you listen to the way I speak, I have a lot of rhythm, use a lot of accents. When I'm playing my instrument, that concept comes through very clearly.

Jazz is rhythm and meaning.

I have never been too concerned about things you're supposed to be concerned about as a singer. Pitch is important, and so is sounding good. But I think there's something underneath all that.

You know what the material is so that you never play it the same way twice.

I think poetry is able to say things in such a small, perfect way that are so hard to say. I think it's a perfect medium for expressing difficult ideas and concepts and feelings. It's one of my great loves.

Just because you have developed the craft on your instrument doesn't mean that you don't have the ability to be expressive emotionally on that instrument, or vice versa.

Technique is superficial. The method used in applying technique is what gives music its character.

If I've made something really serene... well, if everything is like that, it's like having too much icing on your cake. You need something else under it, some kind of grounding. It's like if you're making a film, you can't have only happy moments, or else they become meaningless.

I've listened to musicians who say that using a metronone makes you robotic, that it decreases your 'feel.' That's ridiculous. Either you have feel or you don't. Feel is one of those intangibles that can't be taught. But if you do have feel, using a metronome will allow you to play cleaner - and that'll make your 'feel' have more, well, 'feeling.'

Most things that I write are in very specific forms. A score will have a shape and profile, and then the more emotional and intimate moments will come.

As a drummer, I always approach things as, 'I want to play just enough to keep other drummers interested, but not enough to go over the average listener's head.'

One of the ways to use your depth is to play with speed.