Pete Waterman Quotes

I've been ripping the Rolling Stones off with every song I write in some form or another.

I wear my musical heart on my sleeve and show all my influences off. I'm happy for someone to point out that my song sounds like someone else's.

I've always covered some Dylan songs. I do one or two. And I do them because they're great songs. You know some people cover songs they wish they could have written, not me. I like to cover songs I know I could not have ever written.

I know there's bands that might write something that sounds like The Smiths, and they'll go, 'Oh, it sounds like The Smiths, we've got to make it sound not like The Smiths.'

Talking about covers, whether visually or sonically, if a particular combination of notes struck a chord in your heart in a way that you want to be a part of it by covering that song, then there's nothing wrong with it.

I know when I started I would have been happy to sound like the Beatles or Joe Tex or whoever. You want to sound like most bands, you want to sound like their records and that's how you learn your chops.

Somebody said I sound like an old lady, and I was really insulted by that. I'm trying to sound like Skip James and Smokey Robinson and Marvin Gaye.

In my fiction, there's a lot that's borrowed from music. It's never like I'm taking a lyric, but more the mood of a particular song. 'The Boy Detective Fails' was like listening to 'Eleanor Rigby' by The Beatles, this very melancholy-but-poppy song.

Irving Berlin was the greatest songwriter of all time. I was in awe of him. But his music wasn't my music. My music was the blues.

You'd be surprised. Drummers ape each other. The way every rock n' roll record sounds like something else but not all together. Everything other drummers play, if you're playing drums, they all hear.

I wrote 'The River' practically trying to rip off every lick that James Taylor had, so it was neat to hear him sing those lyrics because that's who inspired you to write them.

If there was a direct influence on a song, I never hid it.

I think Sia is a pretty good reference for me because her way of 'singing and the way she composes the melodies and writes the lyrics is very similar to what I've always done.

I started writing songs after I heard Hank Williams.

A lot of songs are derivative of each other.

I grew up with The Beatles, Bob Marley and Talking Heads. I like the melody-with-rhythm aspect of music - there's so much to discover still.

I've always loved War's Low Rider and Sly Stone's Thank You, and I just wanted to put my take on them.

I take my hat off to people like the Stones, but it's not for me. I couldn't do that. Jagger is brilliant and long may he rock. I couldn't make my career out of old songs; it would do my head in.

My inspiration is R. Kelly, Michael Jackson, and Prince - for the vocals, anyway.

We love the great Disney songs - they have always inspired us in our work and in our lives! But for 'Let It Go,' we looked elsewhere - to powerful female singer-songwriters like Tori Amos, Aimee Mann, Sara Bareilles, Adele.

We were accused of sounding like a couple of bands when we started out. Aerosmith was one.

I used to study 'Hunky Dory' - and be mad that I hadn't figured out anything that cool!

I started learning everybody's riffs, from Donny Hathaway to Jeffrey Osborne to James Ingram. That helped me create my own style of singing.

We listened to 'Beverly Hills.' I wanted to maybe even do a real 'Africa'-type version of that, I was thinking about for a minute.

It's like, whenever I do any kind of cover, if it's a jazz piece or pop cover, I want to honor the original and make sure that the bulk and the juice of what makes that so great is there, but take it to a different place.