Richard Rodgers Quotes

I love hip-hop and soul, but I desperately want to challenge it and see what I can bring to it.

I learn stuff from making music every time I go in the studio. I'm continuing to try to find new ways to play in a song or be in a song and have a positive impact on a song.

We have always wanted to write songs and be experimental in that way.

Working with Prince, it's kind of like he's opened up this whole new world, especially with the horn players. And I'm like, 'Man, only if I had strings on this album, too.' And I'm like, 'I wish I had an orchestra.' So I just, you know - I just wonder what's next, you know. I just want to constantly push myself for more.

In the '70s, my playing was completely untutored, but it sounded good to me, and I tried to find ways to make those very simple things work in more ambitious contexts.

We're not complete prodigies musically and as a band together it takes more and more work to find something new and special.

I think it's really important to show new styles of song and music. I think that's what people want to see and hear from me.

I think with everything I do, I'm trying to just come up with new ways of creating music and mixing styles together. That's just what's fun for me to do, to try to make myself inspired.

I'm actually doing what I like doing, which is mixing opera music and classical music with soul and folk. And I was writing and talking about what I've actually experienced, and I don't think that's very common.

Whether it's a song that might deviate from an artists' usual sound or even if it's still very much in their world, I think the more people opening themselves up creatively to collaborate with others, the better.

I just want to be a part of a band that will be able to reinvent themselves, you know.

I really wanted the first record to be different from what I'd done with Genesis, so we were trying to do things in different styles.

I think most producers and MCs are constantly in this competition, but it's usually with yourself. It's usually wanting to be innovative: wanting to catch yourself when you're doing the same thing or throwing out the same art you've already done.

I think it's healthy to have a lot of different styles within a genre. It makes it much more interesting.

I'm not interested in re-creating the same blues I love so much. I'm interested in pushing boundaries.

I really just care about making music and how I can make it next.

Everybody in Lynyrd Skynyrd loves different styles of music, and our minds are very open when it comes to writing our songs and making the band true to what the band is, but also stepping out and doing something current.

What I do is I basically make records to please myself first and foremost, and so one of the most important things for me as a musician and a writer and a producer is to feel like there's always a sense of evolution and reinvention with each record.

There are a lot of great recording artists, like Jack White and Jack Johnson, who stay confined inside a very small box, but I'm more like Bon Iver, who recorded an album with programmed drums, and the next record was totally organic. I get that.

I'm influenced by a lot of different genres of music. So I'm constantly trying to rework production and make things interesting in the live show and on records.

I started playing in my first band when I was 12. I like to date myself by saying I was in a New Age band when it wasn't ironic; it was actually called new wave because it was new.

Pushing the envelope, musically speaking, is what needs to be done to rise to the top.

The goal of serious musicians is to play outside of yourself. That's most likely with people who suggest things that are outside your musical experience.

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.

In all of my years in this business, I've always been part of either a progressive band or a metal band.