Steve Young Quotes

It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most.

I have been a huge, huge fan of music ever since I was a kid. Anything to do with music inspires me.

When I was 14, I heard Otis Redding in a club local to me, and I was blown away. It leaped out at me and went straight to my heart. I set my sights on singing like that.

My dream as a child was to play with a bass player like Ray Brown, who played with the Oscar Peterson Trio. The feeling I had listening to his work was almost carnal, so to actually play for him was earth-shattering for me.

When I was around 7 or 8 my Dad took me to a B.B. King recording session, well, that really did it. Huge and lasting impressions. After all that I pretty much knew playing guitar was something I was going to do because I just had to do it. And I did.

A lot of kids bought guitars and started playing rock'n'roll because of us.

I didn't really want to write just lyrics, but I wanted to meet Leonard Bernstein. Music was always the first reason I was writing songs.

In the physical universe, there are objects that include suns, planets, all life, and all matter in all dimensions. And then there is the space where all these things exist. That space is the vital element. For virtually every kid since 1968 who picked up a guitar to find his voice on the instrument, Jimmy Page has been the space that enables all our notes to be played.

There's always so much music around me now, it seems like everything has to be something with music, so in my spare time I try not to listen to anything. It's so hard for me to listen to something without trying to see a benefit in it: 'Maybe I'll make my own version of that track or maybe I'll do this or that.'

I don't even know what made me start wanting to do music. It just... happened. Because I sat in my basement all the time, and music was my best friend, and I just wanted to be a part of it.

I was living on the wrong side of the tracks in Evanston, Illinois, in a home for boys. We had these Jackson 5 records. I really related to their voices - they were about my age, but they were doing it.

R Stevie Moore was obviously a huge influence and is still a very big influence in my life.

My dad has been playing guitar basically all his life. He's sort of who got me into rock music.

Growing up, I listened to a lot of everything - I fell in love with music, when I discovered people like Lauryn Hill and Tracy Chapman, people whose voices I could really feel, people with a lot of soul. That's what I'm drawn to as a musician: Anybody that has their own voice and their own point of view.

Beats are really inspiring. They always make me want to write something over them.

My dad played a little bit of piano and guitar, but not that professionally. I saw him play, and I said, 'I want to play. I want to try this instrument.'

When I was nine, I was passing by a drum class and saw them playing and I was moved. That's why I started making music.

At the time I learned drums, I wanted to be the drummer of Hanson. I wanted to be this guy because he was so young, and he was already drumming in the band, you know, so I just wanted to be like him. And later, I discovered hip-hop music at boarding school.

I started writing probably around when I was 15, because that's when I picked up the guitar. That was also around the same time when I began to create my own music, and everything really just clicked for me, and I knew this was what I was going to do.

I actually wanted to be a jazz musician first. My grandparents introduced me to Louis Armstrong. I loved Louis Armstrong so I took up the trumpet and just did that every day and practiced that.

As a kid, I was obsessed with the Who. They were the most important band to me. Songs like "I'm One" helped me get through high school.

It was very interesting time to be in England. Even at that point [John] Lennon and [Paul] McCartney influenced my writing. I thought, "maybe there is a huck or two in here I haven't thought of".

I was really into music. I started playing guitar also when I was nine. I wanted to be in the Beatles, even though John Lennon died the year I got a guitar and the Beatles broke up before I was born.

What draws people to the instrument is the love for guitar players that play a certain way. I mean, even though it wasn't intentional, it was hard to avoid copying Eddie Van Halen. He was basically the *bleep* back then.

When we were kids growing up in Liverpool, all we ever wanted to be was Elvis Presley.