Devin Townsend Quotes

I've made more than 50 records with a wide range of music. I've often veered to check something out.

It's like Willie Nelson. You're an artist and you have different styles inside of you.

I think to stay in one sound is a career killer.

When we think about big records, a lot of producers are thinking of how to make it as standard as possible. I think those days are gone. I think you have to surprise the audience in 2015.

I really enjoy doing remixes, but I don't want to be known as just a 'remix artist' for the rest of my career.

I listen to a wide range of music, from country to pop to alternative rock, as well as Indian music. You know, what excites me are new ideas. And with a lot of the international hits - from Lady Gaga to Rihanna and others - you'd find excellent production and groundbreaking ideas that lift the music to a greater realm.

I'm interested in a lot of different sounds and types of music.

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.

Everybody was tellin' me that I had to do something different, and I kind of agreed that I did need to vary it a little bit. I still love some rock 'n' roll too.

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

When I moved to Hollywood, I was expecting it to be this Mecca of extraordinarily talented musicians, and it was instead the era of Faster Pussycat and bands that had an appeal, but I couldn't do anything like that. There's nothing in my being that can do anything like that.

With rap, you go in the studio, you make music, you put the music out, then all of a sudden, you're a star: you have a big record on the radio, and you're on stage, and you've never done it before. Let's say your first show is 'Summer Jam,' and you're in front of 60,000 people, and you've never played an arena, ever. You're gonna suck.

I always loved bands who would try to change their sound radically album to album, experiment in one album and revert back in another.

This song 'All Aboard,' that tune allowed me to expand and kind of offer my audience something totally different because it's not bachata - I'm singing English, and that was really fun.

I feel like my music has so many different things going on. I've always worked with many different producers. And a lot of times, each of them has a different thing that I really love about what they do.

I want to eventually get to a point where I can make all types of music for every type of crowd.

I think it's really important to show new styles of song and music. I think that's what people want to see and hear from me.

Prince, you never knew what to expect from him from one album to the next. Miles Davis was like that. You know, once you get used to one style, boom, he switched it and, you know, switched gears on you. So those artists are very exciting to me, very exciting to follow their path, you know, and their journey.

There are a lot of great recording artists, like Jack White and Jack Johnson, who stay confined inside a very small box, but I'm more like Bon Iver, who recorded an album with programmed drums, and the next record was totally organic. I get that.

I'm influenced by a lot of different genres of music. So I'm constantly trying to rework production and make things interesting in the live show and on records.

Throughout my career I've never worried about who will be singing my song on the screen.

When you play a show or festival, people know what they're getting; they want it. Then you're thrown onto a show where people are watching TV in their houses, and whether they ask for it or not, we're being played in front of them. There's a lot of negative feedback.

The only advice I can give is to absorb as much as you can from as wide a spectrum as you can. If you're in a rock band and only soak up Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple kind of beginnings, then you're not going to have much leeway.

In any event, I'm proud to wear the badge of jazz vocalist if that's what people want to call me; but at the same time, there are many other things I like to do.

I can work with all these different kinds of artists and still be able to come up with huge records. Not just cool records, but game-changing records.