Steve Hackett Quotes

I've always wanted to make music like people write plays, so I was inspired by writers as much as musicians.

Songwriting has become such a big part of what I do that emotions and the melodies that accompany them blur into one.

In my songs, I'm not saying something that's never been said before. The have lyrics aren't going to blow people away. It's the emotion and the melody that drive it home.

My training in music and composition then led me to a kind of musical language process in which, for example, the sound of the words I play with has to expose their true meaning against their will so to speak.

Some people start with the lyrics first because they know what they want to talk about and they just write a whole bunch of lyrical ideas, but for me the music tells me what to talk about.

The blessing of being able to write music and let music speak for itself is you let the melodies and let the lyrics and the groove talk to people instead of me talking to people.

Music should be able to invoke the natural emotions in all human beings. Music is not notes fixed on apiece of paper.

'My Life' is not an autobiography. It's just music.

My proposition is that music is at the heart of what 'The Magic Flute' means: that it's Mozart's music, not the words, we should be attending to. Music expresses what can't be expressed otherwise.

The character of instrumental music... lets the emotions radiate and shine in their own character without presuming to display them as real or imaginary representations.

I always loved singing and writing poetry. I always loved music, and I've loved writing my whole life. When I put them together, it was probably in my early 20s where I put words to music for the first time.

I hear music as narrative.

I've been writing music since 4th grade, and I love putting words together and expressing things in a way that you can move your head to and you can really relate to, because I have a lot to say.

I'm into song-writing; I'm into melodies that break your heart a little bit. That's the thing that got me into music; that's what I look for in music for the most part.

Any time you write a song, you kind of know what you want from it. You know what you're getting from it.

Lyrics are so important, but they're really underrated.

Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.

Sure, I love people, and I want to communicate with people. I mean, what is music anyway? It's a form of communication - at least for me it is. And that's why I play the kind of music that I think - that I hope - can communicate with people.

I feel like vocals are to music what portraits are to painting. They're the humanity. Landscapes are good and fine, but at the end of the day everyone loves the Mona Lisa.

All music has to speak in some form or other.

My template for most songs is 'Is this inspiring?' and with the blues it so often is.

Every song I've ever written always starts with the words because I want the music to be the musical extension of the feelings of the words, and not the words being the emotional extension of the feeling of the music.

Everyone's just extracting meaning and feeling and emotion from almost every aspect of music, and I think that for me, it's a huge antidote to that to have a concept album.

The guitar for me is a translation device. It's not a goal. And in some ways, jazz isn't a destination for me. For me, jazz is a vehicle that takes you to the true destination - a musical one that describes all kinds of stuff about the human condition and the way music works.

One thing I've tried to do in writing music is take on very basic things, very archetypal things.