Michael Jackson Quotes

I'm quite an eclectic musician.

My favorite band of all time is The Clash. The thing I love about The Clash is they started out as guys who could barely play three chords. They dabbled in reggae, punk, rap, jazz. They came to a sound that could only be defined as The Clash. It was impossible to say what it was. I admire them for that.

I'm a lover of all sorts of music, which makes me a chameleon when it comes to performing anything, whether it's opera or whatever. As long as it's good and it feels good, I'm going to cling to it.

I guess I always think the people that know me or fans that have followed me and know my solo work would know that I've always had really eclectic tastes - even in Motley, dude.

Musically, my palette is eclectic.

Nothing can ever be wrong about music.

I like pop music, and I like really weird, strange stuff. It just didn't feel like there was anyone doing both.

I don't really think of Dire Straits as a sound, you know. It. just depends on the song, and the stuff we're doing is so varied.

You have to be ready, and also you have to discard notions that are fondly held by a lot of musicians, about sequences and notes and about scales and musical systems as a whole. If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.

A blown-out tube ripped some of the grind from the amplifier, throwing us into a momentary tizzy. The unusual sound led me to play unusually, and the recorded take turned out to be a keeper. Insriration can come from the most unlikely places ... keep your head on and your ears open.

Traveling changed my personality and gave me ability to do the music I do and to think in a certain way that everything can be possible.

I think it's just a conglomerate of everybody's influences that comes out on the record, and live as well.

The theory is that you don't play a song the same way twice because it's jazz. That's where I'm coming from.

I was fortunate enough to work at the peak of the great golden age of musicals. And then for awhile, I think they were being advanced in different ways. Andrew Lloyd-Webber brought the rock beat to musicals; people tried different things. The joy of musicals is that there is no perfect recipe; it is what you throw into it.

I'd like to be able to be more topical and timely and more of-the-moment and I think the way to do that is, instead of waiting until I have twelve songs to release all at once, just to release them as I come up with them.

I would say that I'm very proud that Metallica plays heavy music - but equally proud that we don't think like a heavy-metal band.

One way of working is just bring a group of totally different musicians together and encourage them to stick to their guns, not to do the thing that normally happens in a working situation where everyone homogenizes and concedes certain points - so eventually they're all playing in roughly the same style. I wanted quite the opposite of that. I wanted them to accent their styles, so that they pulled away. So there would be a kind of space in the middle where I could operate, and attempt to make these things coalesce in some way. In fact quite a lot of my stuff has arisen from that.

Music is a language, and it's like a dictionary that has a lot of words, but if you limited yourself to a couple of definitions you would be illiterate. If one limits oneself to a peculiar definition like 'new music,' 'avant-garde,' or something like that, I think it's like cutting out half the dictionary.

I just start singing some words with a tune. I don't ever write a song thinking, Now I'll write a song about... .

Nobody makes art for an elite, not if they're a real artist. You try and reach as many people as possible with whatever it is that you make. If a chef is making an omelette, he wants everyone to think that it tastes great because he did it. And if it does, then that's a success because everyone eats it.

It's always fun to improvise. What's weird is that when you're recording, you're by yourself, for the most part.

I think once everything is in place, once you've kind of wrapped your head around the story and the character, it's very liberating and you can start doing things like you would do.

There are so many wonderful classic roles, but I also would be really interested in developing something brand new. I think my heart would probably be in developing something brand new; I think that sounds really exciting.

Sound is what drives my solos, not verbal concepts, I never think 'I'm going to use a Lydian Dominant scale and then go up a half-step', even though that might be exactly what I end up doing.

Flexibility is an essential part of Jazz. It's what gives Jazz music the ability to combine with all other types of music and not lose its identity.