Jason Isbell Quotes

My experience with Buffalo Springfield was that they did not rehearse.

Widespread Panic discovered a couple of my songs and started doin' 'em on the gigs. They'd take a song and expand it and everybody plays a long time and people really like that. But I made my living as a songwriter so I try to get to singin' and get it over with.

I have a buddy of mine who's a musician, and I play guitar and sing quite a bit with him.

I always dreamed of writing in an orchestral context. But when you finish a piece, you want to hear it. So we played everything with Phish.

We would play, then they would play a set, then we would jam on the last song.

The band set up in January and just started rehearsing. If there was a song, we'd just rehearse it as a band, and it would get arranged as a band, and it got changed around a lot.

I began both auditioning with Pearl Jam and recording for Eleven. In the fall of 1994, I joined Pearl Jam.

Throughout my whole life, as a performer, I've never played with a band. I've always played alone, so I was never required to stay in rhythm or anything. So it was a real different experience for me to start playing with a band. There were so many basic things for me to learn.

We went through this business of me writing out all the parts for these old songs from Gravity and Speechless and we'd been performing that, but we don't do that any more.

I mean, I can sit down with a guitar, and in fact, we do two, three songs with just guitar and percussion.

I am just the band leader, and I just keep everything in tune.

Your band members? Your band members don't want to be tied to a machine. They want to be playing. That's what the Beatles did. And the Beatles' stuff is timeless. That's what I would suggest. Just get back to sweating, playing hard, hammering, and having a blast.

Playing in an orchestra is where I learned the most about music.

I have a great band from Jersey and New York. I say that because they got great attitude, and we have a great time on stage.

I always communicate musically. I want my band not only to learn the form and feel of the song by ear, like I do, but also have the freedom to contribute.

When I started doing the acoustic shows, people would be yelling for 'Hooligan's Holiday' and 'Smoke The Sky,' and I had no idea of how to pull them off.

I feel like once you go with a band, it's hard to go back. I just don't see myself performing without a band.

Motley Crue recorded 'Tonight' and it's great fun to hear other people do my stuff. The only problem with it is it's so damn hard to play.

We kind of established in Sons of Apollo right from the get go that it would be a very collaborative process musically, but after that, I was going to take the reins and control everything else beyond that the way I did with Dream Theater.

When we recorded 'Iowa,' we jammed, we went through the songs, we played as a band and we recorded as a band.

I always really wanted to do film scoring, largely because I hate writing lyrics. I just won't do it. I need help with the words.

As a rock band, you're slightly one foot in the past, playing instruments like guitar, bass and drums.

You write a song; you know what you want it to sound like. With a band like ours, it's more about the collective. It's important everyone feels expressed and represented.

In any musician's career, a film like 'Manikarnika' becomes a landmark dream project, which is challenging and musically enriching at the same time.

The synth helped us in that it meant you didn't have to be a traditional four-piece band and basically, you didn't have to work too hard.