Robert Palmer Quotes

Women do not like CDs of live music. We only like the original recordings. If a song sounds different from the version we fell in love with, then it's awful.

What turns me on is to walk into a sold-out venue. The audiences are so much the same as they were in the '60s. It's just an amazing thing. I can't explain it, but I hope it never stops.

I wish the rock 'n' roll scene to be back in.

I saw Sleater Kinney perform back when I was in college.

We're a band's band. We have real songs, real players, real problems. Real ups, real downs.

For a stretch of time, I got really caught up in the idea that what people liked about my work was that I was a young guy who was trying to be cool by writing about young people and a certain kind of Bay Area culture that I was tangentially a part of.

The basis of national identity is to say, "This is authentic to me or my forebears," and is there even such a thing? How authentic is it to your life? Just because your grandfather did it, what does that have to do with you? If I say I'm working in the style of Rembrandt, so what? You can say it, but are you really? No, because when you try to literally copy a cultural artifact, you change it. It dissolves, and then who's looking at it? People who appreciate that kind of drawing, or people it means nothing to?

Rich kids who write songs about food stamps always piss me off. I'm not going to write any songs about that, either.

I'm not against White writers writing about Blacks as long as they are as objective as say James McPherson writing about an Irish American janitor in his brilliant short story "Gold Coast."

It seemed to me to be a parable of the exchange of goods, rather Marxist in some ways, in the new world of global forces. What the forgers do is write the brand name to try and change it, and it works! Loads of people buy fake Prada handbags, or Chanel sunglasses; they've been changed. They have been truly, really changed.

Jazz is an Uncle Tom word. They should stop using that word for selling. I told George Wein the other day that he should stop using it.

When you hear my records today hear a vanilla sounding artist with no black inflection, although I was trying to imitate what I heard.

I actually don't go to shows anymore. Rock concerts have lost their appeal for me.

Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.

You can't go on stage and live - it's false all the way. I can't stand the premise of going out in jeans and a guitar and looking as real as you can in front of 18,000 people. I mean, it's not normal!

Maybe because I have spent too much of my life in rock clubs. I don't really go to parties anymore either. I'll usually be in the bus by 11:30 after a show.

I don't really go out to clubs, but if I did, I'd just want to go rock out with my mates or whatever.

Nashville, man. That's the place to be.

My goal is that when the last song is over, and you're walking back to the parking lot, you're already on your phone searching to find the next show.

Music films are great, but they can never compete with a live performance. Live music is what it is. It's the whole point. You experience it in the moment.

The jargon of authenticity ... is a trademark of societalized chosenness, ... sub-language as superior language.

Now any person who plays an acoustic guitar standing up on stage with a microphone is a folk singer. Some grandmother with a baby in her arms singing a 500-year-old song, well, she's not a folk singer, she's not on stage with a guitar and a microphone. No, she's just an old grandmother singing an old song. The term "folk singer" has gotten warped.

No matter what, I will always prefer a live performance. Whether it be a play or a musical, or playing music live. As long as it's live, it's the best because there's sort of an immediacy to connection between an audience and a performer, whereas where you do film or television, you're at the whim of so many different forces.

Jazz is a word they use to sell our music, but to me that word does not exist.

A lot of times I don't know if I trust the director to tell that film's story. Or I think it's inappropriate for a male director to tell a female story, or a white director to tell a black story. Everyone walks away from a movie differently, because you're relating it to your own life.