Steven Wilson Quotes

Miles Davis would have this lineup of all these amazing musicians and one day would just say, 'We're done.' After tons of great records and tickets sold, he said, 'Now I'm going to grow my hair out and play my horn through a wah-wah pedal.' Rather than play it safe, he went on.

I think if anything, what 'The Astonishing' proved is that we're always going to experiment.

After years of doing composition, the risk is always that you might start to repeat and be cliche. Every time, I try find a way to be reborn again as an artist. Its not easy to reinvent yourself every time, as it takes a lot of creative energy, but I am happy to do it.

People resist change; if they like something, then they want you to keep doing it over and over - but I think if you like what a particular band or artist does, then you should want to see what they're going to do next.

Some of those songs, you really have to bite them. You challenge yourself, you challenge the audience, you do something different. People weren't expecting it.

Everything that an artist does is a risk. Some people want you to stay the same. If you want to evolve, they want to keep you in a certain place.

It's really interesting to just look at the career of a musician and a producer that went into many different genres and many different styles and many different places but always breaking the barriers between genres and at some point reinventing himself all along the way but also inventing things at the same time.

Certain jazz musicians just copy what was done 100 years ago. The music won't grow if nobody takes a risk.

I'm not interested in re-creating the same blues I love so much. I'm interested in pushing boundaries.

I've never been one to just play safe music and think that's all there is to it.

I'm always going to be experimenting musically, trying new things.

People come in because they like 'Old Town Road.' They'll find out that I'm just not going to stick to that.

I'll never stick to one sound, I switch it up.

I became a singer and a songwriter by learning on the spot, so think I always need to be slightly out of my comfort zone when I do something. I've never stopped being experimental because that's how I started.

One of my biggest heroes and people I was fortunate enough to be around is David Bowie. I look at his career, and he always had the balls to break things that weren't broken, to step away from something and try something new, at risk of failing.

The integrity of being an artist for Frank Stella means going into the unknown.A great artist is somebody who's not scared to reinvent themselves and to start all over again. And some artists do it once, twice, three times in their career. He's done it probably a dozen times or more.

I want to change and try new ideas - allowing your sonic identity to evolve in your music and not being afraid of that. You see musicians hit upon something that works, and then go, "Let's keep doing that for 10 years." And that idea kind of terrifies me a little bit. It becomes like a day job then.

My heroes were Dylan, John Lennon and Picasso, because they each moved their particular medium forward, and when they got to the point where they were comfortable, they always moved on.

On the other hand in London you can get an audience that desires dance to go as far as it can go: they've seen the bricks of ideas built over a period so therefore there is an acceptance of what otherwise might seem out on a limb.

I'm a huge fan of David Hockney. I love the way he keeps reinventing himself.

I think it's always important to constantly keep the band on their toes and try new things that you hope will work. That's how 'Apologize' was born, and maybe down the line another little song will be born by that mentality. I've always really liked that song.

I don't ever try to make a song better than my last song. I just try to make it different from my last one.

I want to change things with everything I do, not for the sake of changing things, but for the sake of taking greater and greater risks, or how minimalist I might be able to be, or how I can involve elements or ingredients in music videos that are not musical, for instance.

Every time I write a song my approach changes.

It was very punk rock for me to take a stab at working with Justin Bieber. I don't know how people portray that, or 'Climax,' for that matter. But for me, it was the most adventurous thing I could have done at that exact moment.