Joshua Bell Quotes

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.

It's a great honor when somebody takes your song and does something different with it. That's what music is all about: to constantly change what somebody else has done.

I can think of only two or three songs out of hundreds I've recorded that I performed as originally written. I like to become intimate with the material and change it to suit me.

We have always adapted ourselves to the songs instead of vice versa.

The 'Voice Kids U.K.' songs were chosen for me, and I had to try and make them mine.

I'm not an original composer. The tunes are not stolen from other tunes necessarily except in a few cases, but they're in the style of songs that I grew up with.

The best thing is when you hear somebody take your song and make something great of it.

I did a concert... in September with the Berlin Philharmonic... They're great musicians, and there's always something to learn from them.

There was one thing Beethoven didn't do. When one of his string quartets was played, you can believe the second violin wasn't improvising.

If it's not going to sound like Terrapin Station, what's the point of playing Terrapin Station?

My opinion is that music is music. As long as you approach doing a remix with truth, I don't see the dance remixes being any different than an hip-hop remix- it's really a different version of the song.

After working with Ligeti I began to hear Brahms and Beethoven differently.

The fact that Stravinsky used the classics as a major influence is obvious. What is interesting is how he used them, how he turned Bach into Stravinsky.

Some people really want to play Mozart and be just performers. I was more interested in invention.

There's the Bacon society, which is fostered by his fourth wife Helen Bacon, but I don't know what kind of performances his music gets. He wrote symphonic music and some chorale music.

A lot of Woody Guthrie's songs were taken from other songs. He would rework the melody and lyrics, and all of a sudden it was a Woody Guthrie song.

We don't need another Woody. Even Bob Dylan knew he couldn't be Woody Guthrie... I like Woody Guthrie fine, but I don't need the 50th generation version of it.

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 thought if Oasis could get away with sounding like The Beatles, I could get away with sounding like Abba.

Every time I do a cover, I completely... pick apart - I take apart the entire song and really reconstruct it. I try and make it my own.

I think if you're going to cover a song, you should definitely take it apart and put it back together as if you wrote it. I don't think you should sing it the same way that the artist sang it - that's kind of pointless.

Western music is Bach, Handel and Schubert. It's good music, cleverly done. As a musician, I can see that.

'Too Young to Fall in Love' is an earlier cut from Motley Crue, but it's one of their best. I'm so drastically different as an artist from their sound, but the challenge of making it my own is what makes doing a cover song fun.

I love rethinking and reimagining songs.

If a song feels good to me, it's not very difficult to make it my own.