Grant-Lee Phillips Quotes

There's something interesting about playing live; you're in the moment, and I think it would be beneficial.

Some people only work to recorded music because it's so reliable and exactly the same every time, which is exactly why I don't.

It's so liberating to play a song in front of 50,000 people that you've never played before. Not something you played a long time ago and have forgotten: Never. Played. Before. There's something magical about it.

I think that those moments before a performer plays are the moments when the potential for something to be created may - or may not - arrive.

Hopefully I'm bringing to rock n' roll the kind of spontaneity that I love, and always believed rock and roll stands for.

I feel my live shows are my music; everything blossoms from the live shows.

There's an awful lot of resources that can be drawn upon in an improvised music concert.

The best shows I play, I almost don't even remember off the stage.

Classical stuff takes a lot of rehearsal time and preparation, but with stuff that involves improvisation, you can over-rehearse it and it gets stale. You don't want it to be too comfortable. In fact, a good sound check, a good rehearsal usually means a bad performance.

I think a show is for fun, and the thing about playing live is that you make mistakes, and that's what's sort of exciting about it.

Well, I would say that music just happens with me, I'm not in the driver's seat when I am at the piano, the piano is.

If I'm focusing on playing and enjoying the song, then it always goes well. I get lost in the song, and the performance is so much better. If the focus becomes not making a mistake, then it just feels rigid to me.

Every performance is different. That's the beauty of it.

When I play a solo I'm just expressing that moment. It can go horribly wrong easily enough.

That's why I love theatre, because things happen in the moment. I think you work without being conscious that you're working.

Screen is satisfying because it's so technical and mysterious. It's like playing roulette: you get a script, you think it's either great or naff, but you have no idea how it will really turn out. On stage, you are your own editor - and you get brief moments of grace, where suddenly you feel free.

But I love singing live. Nothing beats the feeling of going out on stage and going, 'I can really sing.'

A certain rough-around-the-edges improvisational looseness - a sense of something coming together before your eyes, or not quite - may be one of the things that distinguishes performance art from theater.

Performing is a profound experience, at least for me. It's not as if I sit down and play 'Fire and Rain' by myself, just to hear it again. But to offer it up... the energy that it somehow summons live takes me right back, and I do get a reconnection to the emotions.

Doing a musical is like having a kid. It's out there alive somewhere. It's not like a movie or a TV show where what we intended is what everyone will see. The kid can act out. The kid's going to do what it wants to do.

There's real drama in performing live. You never know how it's going to be.

'A Little Nightmare Music' is the first show we created. It's about all the nightmares that can happen in the span of a concert. When things go wrong - when the lights go out or a cellphone rings - that's when an audience suddenly comes alive, wondering what's going to happen next. Things going wrong often leads to something good.

When I think back now to the recording sessions, there is more improvisation than one hears. It's an ideal combination of arrangements and improvisation. Only a few people are able to listen and say what is composed and what is improvised. It's a unit.

You have to create the show anew, and find it anew, on a nightly basis.

I don't miss television. It's too much hurry up and sit around, wait till they do this and do that, and get the lighting just right. I'd much rather go out on a stage anywhere and just play and sing for an hour.