Buddy Rich Quotes

I don't want to sound like Ross; I don't want to sound like Puff. I want to make my own music: French Montana.

What I can offer the game is creating a sound that, when you hear it, you know it's mine.

I didn't want to be one of the Beach Boys or one of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah band. I mean, we appreciated that music. But I didn't want to grow a beard to look like Roy Wood just because I liked him.

As a musician, you want to be your own favorite artist and be able to make the music that is an accumulation of all your favorite influences.

Music is such an intensely personal thing for me, and I knew if I was going to do it, it would be in my own way.

It's not that I don't like American pop; I'm a huge admirer of it, but I think my roots came from a very English and Irish base. Is it all sort of totally non-American sounding, do you think?

I was trying to find an original style that didn't sound like Tony Bennett or anyone else. So I prayed about it, woke up with this high voice, and by 1954, I was going to amateur nights and winning.

My mother's records were formative for me, but when I became a teenager, I wanted to find songs that she wasn't hip to. She was so hip, though, that I had to go outside rock n' roll - so for about 10 years, I only listened to hip-hop, house and techno.

I started to like blues, I guess, when I was about 6 or 7 years old. There was something about it, because nobody else played that kind of music.

I have to choose songs that represent my personality.

When I listen back to my music and everyone else that's out there, I'm aware that there's something I can do that the next guy doesn't do.

I think of a band like Animal Collective where they really follow their own sound and I think that's a really important thing to do. You can find an audience if you can find your voice.

I was singing doo-wop on the corner under the streetlight with four other guys when it wasn't called doo-wop. We just got together and sang, so that music is inside of me. It's a lot of stuff that has been rolling around in here and becoming this compost and has made me who I am as a singer.

In a way, I pattern myself after all the bands I used to like as a kid. Every time they put out LPs, they had a whole new look and a new sound.

The early Bon Jovi stuff I can't stand. I just think we didn't have our stylistic voice. But some people love some of that stuff.

A musician should only sound like what they do, and no two musicians sound the same. It's an individual-feel thing, you know?

I kind of always wanted my own music to just sound like, like me, I suppose, like if I was music it would be the music I make, I think.

My voice is a combination of how I grew up and what I was listening to growing up. I like a lot of different kinds of music and am always being inspired in different ways by different artists for different reasons.

What I'm doing is basically the same as Bob Dylan did with folk songs and Woody Guthrie songs, the same as folk music's always done. I'm not going to sing about ploughing, but I'll write a song that sounds like it should be about ploughing.

I love the pioneers like Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, but when I write music, it comes out in my own way.

The records that I grew up listening to had feel, and the drummers that inspired me - like Stewart Copeland, Neil Peart, Phil Collins and Roger Taylor - all had their own voice and individual style.

Irving Berlin was the greatest songwriter of all time. I was in awe of him. But his music wasn't my music. My music was the blues.

I believe every guitar player inherently has something unique about their playing. They just have to identify what makes them different and develop it.

I didn't want to go out and change anything. I just wanted to make the music that was part of my background, which was rock and blues and hip-hop.

When I was a kid, I remember trying to emulate Stevie Wonder's sound, and Donny Hathaway's sound. It's just part of who I am - I'm just a soulful kind of dude.