Andy Summers Quotes

Conductors start getting good when everybody else retires.

Your experience of life is to a large part distilled into your performing. As you grow older, you concentrate on aspects of music that you perhaps only touched on earlier.

We'll see some simplistic players for a while, who'll then get into more complicated things and evolve with their instruments. This is a cycle that happens over and over again in music.

On 'Van Halen,' I was a young punk, and everything revolved around the fastest kid in town, gunslinger attitude. But I'd say that at the time of 'Fair Warning,' I started concentrating more on songwriting. But I guess in most people's minds I'm just a gunslinger.

I was for a minor amount of time but I was probably a better pianist at 15 than I am now.

My only ambition is to grow as a musician.

Songs are really interesting in that way. Sometimes, they grow with you. Sometimes, you outgrow them.

The more you play music, the better you'll get.

The way I evolved was playing straight-ahead jazz into playing more fusion-type stuff just because I was young enough to get into it. As I get older, I find myself coming back to where I kind of started.

As you grow older, your music begins to mature and grow older along with you.

I think that the only goals that we try to set for ourselves is to evolve musically.

When I look back and think about how I played when I was 16, and moving on to my 20s, 30s, 40s and now 50s - to me, it seems like you gain more experience, you gain more technique, you get better.

Music is, of course, a universal emotional experience, cutting across cultures and languages. I studied piano for ten years as a child and consider that experience one of the most valuable in my life.

You're a constant student, as a musician.

Hopefully, as a band, it will grow and develop for a good length of time.

There are a lot of people holding on to the old Jessie J - whatever that means - but I think there's a lot more people realizing what I'm about. I think people like it.

When I was 19, I joined a rock band, and that's when I began to say, 'Okay, this is something that I could take seriously.' When I came to Minneapolis, it just refined everything.

If I started at 13, by the time I was 14 I was already good enough to play in front of people. I started off playing drums when I was 5, so playing in front of people didn't matter - not a problem.

I've discovered all kinds of music and done all kinds of music over the past 40 years, from playing tango with Piazzolla to all the different bands I've had.

Most good things happen with time; especially music, which needs time to breathe and to find its own way.

If my musical tastes are continuing to grow up, and I am not really too interested in the music that my kids listen to, then I assume that the audience is doing the same.

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

Nirvana is next level. The songs are really cool to connect with on a more mature level, and I don't think I really understood that when I was 15.

I feel like a lot of the fundamental material, I've assimilated. So now the question is: Am I going to really get into my spiritual inheritance of music and really develop my abilities?

I still don't really feel like a bass player.