Barry Hannah Quotes

I didn't decide to become a musician until the age of 15, which is quite late.

I loved music - listening and playing - but of course I could not imagine I would be a professional musician. It really happened step by step.

I've always known from the time I was eight years old what I wanted to do. I would have been fairly content to be someone's lead guitar player.

I was an earnest young man who just wanted to make music.

I actually was a musician in college, a composer and singer, and really intended to be the second coming of Leonard Bernstein when I got out.

I would've loved to have been in a band, but sadly I just wasn't good enough.

My mom was in a band for over 30 years, and my brother, sister, and I start taking classical piano lessons when we were three. She's really the reason why I'm still playing piano - she made me practice every day before school and made it a priority even when we didn't necessarily want it to be.

I've dreamed about doing music since I was three or four years old.

Once I understood Bach's music, I wanted to be a concert pianist. Bach made me dedicate my life to music, and it was that teacher who introduced me to his world.

I started playing trumpet when I was 11 years old. All I wanted to be was a jazz trumpet player when I grew up.

I remember watching the Grammys and looking at the performances and crying to my mom, saying how much I wanted to be there.

And I saw the sax line-up that he had behind him and I thought, I'm going to learn the saxophone. When I grow up, I'm going to play in his band. So I sort of persuaded my dad to get me a kind of a plastic saxophone on the hire purchase plan.

When I was 13, I got my first guitar, and I could sort of play Ted Nugent songs, but I couldn't play the solos. But I could play along with entire Ramones songs.

From childhood I was passionately fond of music and wanted to be a musician. I have no recollection of any real desire ever to be anything else.

I wanted to be Gerry Mulligan, only, see, I didn't have any kind of technique. So I thought, well, baritone sax is kind of easier; I can manage that - except I couldn't afford a baritone, so I bought an alto, which was the same fingering.

I think there are always people who, when they get the bug to play an instrument, they want to get as good as they can with it rather than just be simply adequate at it. You run into them every once in a while - some kid who wants to be the next Stevie Ray Vaughan, for whatever reason, and plays exactly like him.

I dreamed of having a Gibson. I had a cheap Kent - you know, a Japanese guitar - and then a Kanora, a Japanese guitar. I borrowed a friend's Harmony for years. To have a Gibson was really, really my dream as a kid.

The experience awakened 'my tremendous musical ambition, which has never subsided to this day.

My father left his piano at the house when he left, and I wasn't allowed to play it when he was there because I wasn't as good as him. So when he left, I was determined to get as good as him, and I taught myself how to play music, and I just stuck with it, and I did it all the time.

The ultimate part that I want to play in my life is Jimi Hendrix, so I guess I'm drawn to music even though I can't sing or dance very well.

Watching a Kirk Douglas movie, 'Young Man With A Horn,' made me want to be a trumpet player.

My mother and father didn't know anything about instruments. Me just see a man in the country play guitar one time and say, 'My, the man play that guitar nice.'

I have a Stratocaster, which is part of my long, doomed ambition to become Jimi Hendrix.

My father was a studio musician, played for a lot of people like Frank Zappa and a lot of R&B bands, and was always gone doing that. Then when he was home, he was practicing. And so I always saw it, and I always wanted to do what he did.

I've been obsessed with music since I was a little girl. I knew I wanted to be a singer when I was 9 years old.