Alicia Villarreal Quotes

My parents were serious working musicians, but they were not stars - not like pop stars that you have now. They had to make a living and that meant touring, working hard, going on the road - and we were roped in.

Way before we got a record deal, we were playing clubs seven nights a week, three one-hour sets a night. Then we got the record deal, and we took off on the road and stayed out.

I constantly tour, even when I don't have a record out.

I just want to live on the road. I can't understand artists that don't want to perform and, like, get on stage and do their songs for all their fans every night. If I'm not performing every night, I get totally depressed. I know that sounds really weird, but I hate sitting at home and not having a 1 A.M. performance now. It kills me.

I have so much respect for television actors and directors. We're on set doing 16-hour days, and that's just what we do.

Yeah, touring can get rough some times and draining, but I always have to pinch myself and realize that I'm doing what I love.

For 10 years, I had a band called Steel Train. We made three albums. We toured like crazy.

I am a touring artist - I get a kick out of it, like, a huge kick.

When you're in the same band as somebody, you're seeing them almost more than 24 hours a day. You start to see an awful lot of the bad side 'cause touring is no easy thing.

When I started out, there was so much work that I couldn't think of doing anything else. I would go for recordings by 8.30 A.M., that, too, in trains. I used to come home at night. I was travelling alone everywhere.

I have been touring since I got my first band in 1962, so there is no problem there. We are basically performing musicians, so that's what we do.

I knew from a very young age that I wanted to be in that world. But I also understood that being a touring musician meant that you'd be gone a lot and that was going to make other things a lot harder, like having a family.

Just do your job. Get in early. Stay late, and don’t complain. Fight the big fights.

My advice for young people is that, if you want to be a musician, the thing to do is practice eight hours a day.

I don't go about playing music differently. It changes my sleeping schedule and my drinking habits, that's what I like to say.

I won't miss having to stand for two hours at 4:30 a.m. and have freezing cold glue applied to my feet. I won't miss two-hour drives to work or long, long, long days sitting in my trailer waiting...waiting...waiting. I won't miss one day off a week. I won't miss glue in my ears. But I would do it all again tomorrow.

You don't think I work 14 hours a day right now?! I mean, I still put in the hours, I still do the work.

I have yet to hear an instance where misfortune hit a man because he worked overtime. I know lots of instances where it hit men who did not.

Speaking of earning, the revered 40-hour workweek is for losers. Forty hours should be considered the minimum, not the maximum. You don't see highly successful people clocking out of the office every afternoon at five. The losers are the ones caught up in that afternoon rush hour. The winners drive home in the dark.

You can't be afraid of hard work or long hours. Sacrifice is important.

I owe my success to the fact that I never had a clock in my workroom. Seventy-five of us worked twenty hours every day and slept only four hours - and thrived on it.

I posted a video a day for almost two months and was hardly sleeping, but I think it really pushed me to give music everything I had in me. I knew it was a chance I couldn't miss. The funny thing is I never saw my music video when it aired during the Super Bowl because as soon as I heard my song start I was in tears for the next 10 minutes! The most amazing thing that came out of all of this, however, was the support that had developed online. Without the people that came back day after day to vote for me, I'd be nowhere, and I really owe it all to them.

Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. [This] improves the odds of success. If other people are putting in 40 hour work weeks and you’re putting in 100 hour work weeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing you know that you will achieve in 4 months what it takes them a year to achieve.

You don't try any less hard on the ones that don't. I've gotten lucky to work with some amazingly talented people that have helped the ones that have worked work. I think you just have to keep doing the stories you love and the characters that you love and are drawn to.

My career could've been anything, I just wasn't that good at other things. I'd say it was fairly easy starting out as I did in LA, meeting some great friends and musicians and landing a record deal. That's where the hard work began though.