Jay Reatard Quotes

In a live performance, it's a collaboration with the audience; you ride the ebb and flow of the crowd's energy. On television, you don't have that.

With Dream Theater live, I may have been a bit of a focal point because I absolutely live for the energy on stage, and having interaction with the audience is absolutely crucial to me - regardless of how some others have described it!

I just feed off the energy of the audience.

When you're on stage you have a very strange knowledge of what the audience is. It isn't exactly a sound - it's a hum, like the streets.

When you are in the studio, you don't have anybody to feed off of; meanwhile, when you are playing live, you interact with people and you feel the energy in the room. When the crowd is going crazy, that definitely impacts your vocal performance. I prefer to sing live.

I feed off the audience a lot, their energy.

You can feel how the audiences react. For us, it's about the performance and the reaction. We feed off the energy. And no matter how enthusiastic they are, we can tell if we're playing well or not.

Performing in front of an audience gives you an extra ten per cent energy and the chance to react to the instant feedback.

I like that raw energy that I get from an audience.

The crowd really controls how I am onstage. One show, it might be a lot of young people, super-high-energy dancing. I mirror that. Other shows, it's much more calm.

I've never been drawn to concert DVDs because they take away the part of the equation that's most important to seeing a live show: getting jostled around and feeling the energy in the room. I definitely didn't want to make one of those.

When I'm on stage, my interaction with the audience is something that really makes me come alive. It's a feeling like no other. The energy of the crowd fuels something new inside.

At first I missed it, but it was the amazing energy thing that happened during shows, when a lot of people were like Yay Yay Yeah! I missed that for a while. But I don't miss the regular and the business side of that whole thing.

You've got to be like a fan at your show, just wild out. I make eye contact. I get in the crowd and kick it with 'em, stage dive, mosh. I make 'em laugh. I go out there and turn up, have fun. There's no set list; I don't have rehearsals.

A performance is only as good as the audience you are playing to. A lot of times you feed off of the audience, and we always try to give them all we've got and sometimes you don't get a lot back, but we've never been dead whenever we've performed.

I take a lot of pride in my live show and put more energy there than I do in the studio.

It's new and different every night. The charge you get from a good audience is like nothing else.

I still get thrilled by the energy that is a live performance, the fear and the panic and the electricity that happens on the night. I think jolting myself every once in a while with that fear is a good thing for me.

When you're onstage, you're acutely aware of the reaction of a particular group of people, because it's like a wave.

The difference between a theatre with and without an audience is enormous. There is a palpable, critical energy created by the presence of the audience.

Once I'm on stage, the energy of the crowd wipes my nerves away.

My live performance, it just comes from feeling an energy and emotion from the crowd.

There is no buzz like performing for a live audience.

You can't manufacture the feeling of being in a small crowd and connecting on every single level to the very last person in the very last row in the back. I think when you evolve into a headlining act and things get bigger, the intimacy and some of that energy gets lost a little bit.

It is a really bizarre feeling to perform for, like, five people. You get so much energy from an audience, and when it's just five quiet people at a table, that's not the same.