Pete Townshend Quotes

I love hip hop, and I have a bunch of urban songs I write for fun that I can't put on my albums because people would laugh and point.

We don't want to become like country artists where there's a formula.

I love Top 40 pop, don't get me wrong; I just don't think that there's anyone in Top 40 pop that's 'real.'

I have always been a singer/songwriter, and I was pushed in places I didn't want to do, like pop or top forty. I don't belong there.

The joy of songwriting only gets messed up if you are trying to follow up a big success, or you are trying to create a hit single, or if you have conscious thoughts of a particular outcome for the music.

The pop world is cool, but I never really thought of myself as part of it or wanting to be a part of it because I'm on a label that's not really like that. They're not trying to dress me up, they're not trying to do things like that. I feel like I'm sort of separate from that, actually.

Most of the music you hear on the radio today is developed for making money. It doesn't feel true or honest. You can feel it in the music.

David Lee Roth had the idea that if you covered a successful song, you were half way home. C'mon - Van Halen doing 'Dancing in the Streets'? It was stupid. I started feeling like I would rather bomb playing my own songs than be successful playing someone else's music.

The only thing that exists to me is commercial pop music.

I seriously hate pop music and all things super-commercial.

A lot of pop music is based on trying to make people remember it so that they'll buy it. To me, it was not about that.

We're not on a desperate mission to write chart compatible stuff.

Critics used to say that ABBA were formulaic or that our songs were rubbish. We never had time for those comments, though. We were sincere and devoted to what we did.

I have cut four albums so far, and all of them have been trendsetters and commercially successful. I believe that once you start taking art in commercial terms, it ceases to be art.

I think that the stuff I write for pop music is terribly, terribly cheesy.

I've been writing pop songs for pop stars for a couple years and see what their lives are like, and that's just not something I want.

All that pop that you see on the radio? It's just the worst crud I've ever heard in my life. It's designed to make money, and that's about it.

I've always wanted to write pop music. I never wanted to be cool or make a hipster record.

I'm a pop artist, and that's what I'll always be. I don't want to be a 'credible artist.'

Music became so commercialized that I just didn't want anything to do with it. I renounced the industry before it became the fashionable thing to do.

I naturally make commercial music: it's never been a calculated decision to make pop music. I'm a genuine pop music fan.

I don't know how to write or to be anything other than Bananarama-ish because that's who we are.

I could make a PartyNextDoor album that's clean, all hits. That's not what I care about doing.

'Push It,' to me, was very pop. And back then, you were called 'sell-out' to be pop.

Where any view of money exists, art cannot be carried on.