Aaron Dessner Quotes

I may play the same songs night to night, but I never play them the same way.

Music is a living art. You re-create it.

Playing a song changes a song. Every night a song becomes something else on stage.

I think acting is a fun thing because you get to have so many lifetimes in one lifetime, being all these different people.

That makes classical music work, the ability to improvise.

Maybe one day music will just be music, and there won't be these categories; it'll just be different shades of music.

The blues is a mighty long road. Or it could be a river, one that twists and turns and flows into a sea of limitless musical potential.

It's better for the listener to interpret their own meanings to the music.

Doing a musical is like having a kid. It's out there alive somewhere. It's not like a movie or a TV show where what we intended is what everyone will see. The kid can act out. The kid's going to do what it wants to do.

Maybe it's egocentric or whatever, but when I'm playing Beethoven, Bach, Hendrix, or whoever it is, in the end, it just feels like my own music and I'm making it up as I'm going along.

Those differences are what color the performance, but in the movies you don't get a chance to rehearse.

People are always defining and re-defining music. My style of playing has been characterized as smooth jazz and acid jazz. I listen as I play; I'm not caught up in defining the type of music I play.

I used to be a drummer in a band, and I really loved playing the drums, so I look forward to the right opportunity to do that at some point. Maybe even on TV. Every single live performance I'm doing on TV, I want it to be different and unique.

When I sing a tune, the lyrics are important to me. Most of the standard lyrics I know well. And as soon as I hear an arrangement, I get ideas, kind of like blowing a horn. I guess I never sing a tune the same way twice.

I prefer doing TV, where it can be different every time.

In the Led Zeppelin shows of the Sixties and Seventies, it was the same numbers every night, but they were constantly in a state of flux. If I played something good, really substantial, I'd stick it in again.

A song isn't finished until it's played live, and then it moves on.

Each song has its own way that it likes to be done, but it can be more than one way. If you tap into it, you can feel it.

I sang 'Nessun Dorma' twice with Pavarotti, and he told me he'd heard 'Smoke' about five or six times, and every time was different. He was so jealous because if he deviated one jot from the traditional interpretation of the famous arias, he'd be crucified. We have the freedom.

I'm not really going to defend anyone's lyrics.

Every time I sit down in front of my piano, I like to improvise with the instrument. It depends on my mood of that day what kind of melodies and rhythms I am playing around. Sometimes, even before starting to play I already have a quite clear picture of a song I would like to compose, or at least the sound of it.

Most of the musicians I play with - aside from the form and structure of the music - the interpretation is up to them.

With songs, it doesn't matter what song it is; every time I go out and perform it, it's like the first time I'm performing it, the first time I wrote it. If it's not, then I'm not going to do it that night.

Musicians are also interpretive artists and we are just as creative as painters and writers. We interpret in a way that expresses ourselves.

You could play probably a span of 50 years of me playing St. Louis Blues, and most of the time it will be different every time.