John Oates Quotes

Weezer isn't stuck in roles, so we just do what we want to do, what makes us excited.

With anything I do, it's hard to categorize it. With any project, I just go in and blindly start writing songs and then find out which way we want to go with it.

I keep a band of great young people around me, and we're not musically restrained. It's not about 'Let's do it correct' but 'Let's do it right.'

With 'Boxer,' we made the kind of music we wanted to make and didn't really worry about what the expectation was.

Nothing can ever be a rule in drama, because then you're saying certain things won't ever happen, and that would be very boring.

I love the idea of stepping out of the band situation into a solo world with no boundaries, no expectations, where nothing is out of bounds.

When I'm in the studio, there are no boundaries.

I don't want to have the bounds put on me in terms of mediums.

I always just experiment with different sounds and styles until I find something that evokes the feeling I'm going for. I'm not trying to think too much about what anyone else is doing.

As an artist, you need to be true to yourself and free and not put yourself in a box that contradicts with what you feel is needed for a song.

So when I went to Arista, I had a period of writing where I suddenly was unrestricted. I wasn't writing for a band for the first time. It opened up a whole other arena for me to work within.

I just really need to sing and sing and sing and not worry about writing. Just by singing for pleasure, your voice takes you to what it wants to sing. And that is how the best stuff kind of emerges.

We don't like trends. We formed initially because we felt we had something of our own to say. What was happening was lacking in certain aspects - it needed a different point of view, a variant on things, but with the same attack, impact.

One of the advantages of not going to art school is that you're not taught what you can't do.

I just don't feel limited by genre.

To me, one of the big fears of doing a big huge graphic novel is locking yourself into one style and getting halfway through it and going, 'Oh I made the wrong choice,' which is a recurring nightmare I have.

My ethos is musical freedom: to create whatever I want.

We don't want to box ourselves within any type of genre, you know? Whatever feels good, if it moves us and we like it, we get on it and make it our own. That's what we do.

I didn't come up as a DJ, so I don't play by DJ rules.

I don't believe in reducing a style and a voice down to a set of descriptions, so I've never done that.

I can run the gamut with beats that no one else would think of. I'm not a trained musician, so I focus on what feels right before I dispatch to writing.

I don't want to put myself in any kind of a box as far as my sound goes, because being an artist is fluid. If you look at a painter's work, a lot of times, it's similar in style, but other times - over even a year's period - it can change so much. I'm just going with the flow.

Working with David Lynch, rules go out the door.

There are no rules when I'm making stuff. That's why I'm glad I'm not signed. No one's telling me I got to drop this type of single or this video.

I never really had the chance to play the kind of music I wanted to play. It was always just classical. It had its limits. I play piano now and again in the new forms of music that I actually want to play, but at the time, it was something that I just kind of moved past.