Leonard Slatkin Quotes

What drew me to the violin was mastering the instrument technically, which I'm continuing to do. You want to push boundaries, to not always be in your comfort zone. If you don't, you get stale. So you have to find areas of growth.

I got bored with the old way - it came too easy. I worked until I could play and chord changes at any tempo in any key, and then said 'What else is there?' Now I'm finding out.

A lot of times, when a band finds success with a certain style or sound, they have a really hard time breaking away from that to grow as artists.

It's taken me all my life to learn what not to play.

Ideally, I'd really like to put my own stamp on things, but it takes years, you know, and you're constantly learning and studying and falling in and out with your instrument, learning different approaches and different attacks.

I mean as long as I have been doing music I know I am only 30% of what I could be and want to be.

Now, when we first started, I would be playing something good and then feel like I wasn't doing the right thing and launch into some idiotic cliche. Luckily for me, Bobby was patient.

Music is all about wanting to be better at it.

I've seen and learned enough to keep my music fresh and spread out.

After my second-to-last record, 'The Greatest', I had gone on tour for a while, and I didn't play an instrument for about five years. And I got kind of - it's not self-esteem or whatever, or anger toward myself - but disappointed in myself that I hadn't been challenging myself to learn musically.

I would have to say I'm bored with the standard rock, guitar solos, but I've done it for five albums now, and this time I wanted to go in a completely different direction. I wasn't interested in showing off any more.

We were playing, not for the drunks, but for the musicians, because it was more intellectually challenging. We needed somewhere to put our energy to show that we were growing, and as we started to achieve this, people came to hear us musically.

To play music, you have to understand it. I didn't understand 'Topographic Oceans.' That's why I hardly played on it. It frustrated me no end - and playing the whole thing on tour, I got farther and farther away from it.

My problem is: as a singer and a dancer, if I get it in my body one way, it is harder for me to be open to something new - to something else; to something that is really organically connected to the piece and not just to my perception of it.

I prefer to think of myself as a musician who is still learning and trying to do something every time out.

Well, no. I believe that it's not at all impossible that some of the performances that I've heard so far by some pianists may be superior to my own playing because those are two totally different acts altogether.

Acquiring a repertoire in these days, when the vocal literature is so immense, so overwhelming, that the student with sense will devote all his energies to work and not imagine himself a martyr to art.

What I appreciate about Sleater-Kinney is that we did six records, and they all felt different. It was a band that was able to encapsulate different sensibilities because we were focusing on it as music and art and not as a statement.

I don't think I'm getting better, quote unquote, as a singer or guitar player. But I'm more comfortable in this particular space. I get better at being a bad singer, so to speak.

I've tried to do every album in a different style, which is why I tend to leave a fair bit of time between each one.

There are people who compose from very young. That is not my case. I went discovering myself.

I believe that experimenting is what production is. But it doesn't mean much if you don't have a solid foundation in what you're experimenting with. You can't really deviate from music unless you know music; it's not gonna work.

My playground as a musician is growing.

As long as I'm still growing as a musician, it keeps me inspired.

The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them and go on an endless squirrel cage chase from new lens to new paper to new developer to new gadget, never staying with one piece of equipment long enough to learn its full capacities, becoming lost in a maze of technical information that is of little or no use since they don't know what to do with it.