Paul Weller Quotes

I had given up the guitar between '75 and '78. I completely lost interest. I was sick of hearing other guitar players and I was tired of my tunes.

I don't find inspiration by just sitting down with a guitar anymore. I lost that. I started being so interested in other kinds of music.

I'm not sure I know how to make music anymore. Maybe you're given a window into things for a time, and beyond that maybe it goes away. Why should you expect it to stay?

I've probably gone a month or two without playing guitar, just because I've gotten so burnt on it touring all year or whatever.

Sometimes you're trapped in writing songs and you don't have enough distance from what you do anymore and you need the talent and the years of other people to come and jump in.

And this whole period of time of gradually working at being a better guitar player and songwriter have gradually led me to the point where I feel I'm doing a clearer representation of the thing that I've been feeling inside me since I was four years old.

One of my biggest thrills for me still is sitting down with a guitar or a piano and just out of nowhere trying to make a song happen.

I picked up the guitar very late, in a very pagan way - I didn't know how to play, but I knew I had to. I drew and I had a diary, but it wasn't enough; I needed to express more. As soon as I learned two notes, I started to tell a story, which is why, I guess, my music resembles blues or folk.

A lot of songs are derivative of each other. Sometimes you need to take a departure from what you do to something that's slightly different in order to get inspiration.

Songs go through cycles for me. And sometimes I lose my passion for some of them.

You write a song about how you think at the time, and then gradually you drift away from that, and when it's far enough in the past, that's when you think, 'Now I have to write something new.'

Right now, it hasn't affected my music other than the fact that I don't have time to write any of it. That's no different from when I first started and I lived at home. I would play the guitar in the afternoon and then my mom or my dad would come home and I'd have to quit.

In every decade rock and roll starts to get very serious and navel gazing and kind of self serious and every once and a while it kind of needs a kick in the pants.

Growing up in Miami, having these different cultures and being inspired in so many ways musically has let me have a very long career, 'cause just when you think I'm gonna do this type of record, I go and do something else.

People ask me how could I go from country to jazz. It's been a natural convergence for me.

Towards the end with Pantera - although I was never unhappy with the music we were making - it became one-dimensional, and we wanted to open things back up.

I did country way back when I was, like, 13-14 years old, and then I kind of fell into the pop genre.

The Lovemongers came together because we felt kind of overinflated by the end of the Eighties.

Some of the music I made for 'Fantastic Damage' I thought I was making for the Company Flow album, but the majority of it was post-Company Flow.

Actually, after 'All Love Lost' I was so drained creatively that I didn't have any clue where I wanted to go. So I just started from scratch.

It's weird. I went so far away from music that I had to re-invent music again. I had to come back to music. I had to put music with an agenda down and at least write for my son, write to keep writing, but the idea of having a music career had to go away for a while.

I didn't start writing music until I was a sophomore in college. I would steal my roommate's guitar and sit on the front porch and kind of blend this weird spoken word and these little melodies over simple chords; that really started my whole journey as a musician.

One day, I was just fingering around on the keys of a Fender Rhodes piano, and I came up with this little riff, and all of a sudden, it morphed into a song. It had never been touched by a guitar, which was very weird for us. 'Under the Ground' is the first song I have ever written that had nothing to do with the guitar.

I'll hear a phrase around me that someone says... I'll write it down in my notebook, and as soon as I'll sit down with my guitar, I'll come up with the rest of the arrangement there.

I didn't decide to play guitar, but that was the instrument which I was offered. I've always been interested in horn-type instruments, such as a saxophone; but those instruments are very expensive, so my dad bought me a guitar instead. I didn't like the guitar at first, but after noodling on it for several months, I developed a feel for it.