Alexa Ray Joel Quotes

It's a great honor when somebody takes your song and does something different with it. That's what music is all about: to constantly change what somebody else has done.

I think if you're going to cover a song, you should definitely take it apart and put it back together as if you wrote it. I don't think you should sing it the same way that the artist sang it - that's kind of pointless.

We were playing popular music, but we were doing our own arrangements because we were too lazy to sit down and figure out the originals.

I always feel that if you're going to cover a song, you should make it your own and flip it on its head.

I try to take whatever I can from the songs I grew up listening to, these vibed-out pop numbers, and make them my own in some weird way.

When I record somebody else's song, I have to make it my own or it doesn't feel right. I'll say to myself, I wrote this and he doesn't know it!

I can think of only two or three songs out of hundreds I've recorded that I performed as originally written. I like to become intimate with the material and change it to suit me.

I love rearranging and reimagining tunes, so I want my audience to enjoy hearing songs in a new way and make their own discoveries.

'Too Young to Fall in Love' is an earlier cut from Motley Crue, but it's one of their best. I'm so drastically different as an artist from their sound, but the challenge of making it my own is what makes doing a cover song fun.

My opinion is that music is music. As long as you approach doing a remix with truth, I don't see the dance remixes being any different than an hip-hop remix- it's really a different version of the song.

Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.

The fact that Stravinsky used the classics as a major influence is obvious. What is interesting is how he used them, how he turned Bach into Stravinsky.

Our approach makes it so if you hear a said song of ours in 2003 and then you hear it again in 2009 it's probably evolved and changed a good bit, and hopefully for the better.

So I didn't have anything to do with picking the songs, but I got to musically take them in places I thought might be interesting, so it was a real neat collaboration among the three of us.

When you're recording classic songs, you've got to kind of make them your own, and you can't always worry about what people are going to think.

There are so many songs out there in the world that - if I know we have to come up with a new cover, then I'll just sit in my room and sing song after song and figure out which one I can kind of sing the best.

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

I regard remaking a film as creating something again.

Don't be afraid to take liberties with this music. Try and put some of yourself into it.

There's some songs you can cover, and I've covered and butchered a few, but you can't do them all.

I may play the same songs night to night, but I never play them the same way.

My mother always told me, even if a song has been done a thousand times, you can still bring something of your own to it. I'd like to think I did that.

Oh see, first off you gotta realize - everything for me is a reconstruction or deconstruction. I would actually say deconstruction. Mission: Impossible would be the exception. That would be a reconstruction- deconstruction.

I strongly suggest that we play down basics like who influenced whom, and instead study the way the influence is transformed, in other words: how the artist made it his own.

The way I like to start a new project is to take a cover song and make a stab at it, ideally one that has nothing to do with the people in the room.