Ringo Starr Quotes

I really love playing music with other people. It's more fun to be on the road with others. It's kind of lonely out there when you play on your own!

I never envisioned myself as a solo artist; I was always part of a band.

That was the reasoning behind learning to play bass, and then after that it was more like it was neat to play songs together - for me to play bass and for him to play guitar.

A lot of musicians have a tough time hearing what we're doing in a trio format.

If you're playing with a number of people, there are all sorts of textures, all kinds of possibilities you can get into. So why just play a theme together and then take solos?

To me, a sure-fire way to get in a rut is by sitting around playing by yourself for too long. You've gotta get out there and jam, man! You don't have to necessarily be in a band, all you've gotta have are a couple of buds who play too. They don't have to be guitarists either; jamming with a bassist or a drummer is cool.

Andy Timmons is someone I've jammed with many times over the years, and we always have a great chemistry when playing together.

I see myself as a composer who plays music and likes to play with other people, and not just as a solo artist.

I think music naturally wants to be played with more than one person. There's a surprise element, and you don't know what it will be, and it's up to that other person's energy to help create this third thing.

It's great to have all this stuff at home. But when you want to make it for real, there's still nothing like making music with a bunch of other great musicians in the same room. That's one thing that'll never change.

Sometimes I like to make music together with a singer or with singers.

I think playing solo is a second rate activity, really. For me, playing is about playing with other people.

I listen mostly to live music, and mostly my musical experience was playing music with other people.

My solo music - I get up onstage, I improvise and it's my improvisation. When I get up onstage with Fred Frith and Mike Patton, then we're improvising together. Then it's not my music; it's our music.

I feel so lucky to have been in a group where it was a real band. This wasn't a singer and guitar player and some other guys.

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

The shows are so different from each other, depending on whether I play with my band, Nine Stories, other musicians, an orchestra, only one or two members of my band.

I'm playing with Bonnie Raitt. I don't have to sing it. I just have to play it. That's cool.

Just because you put super great musicians together, it doesn't mean you're going to have that chemistry as a band.

My friends always had bands, and we would play together.

Even though I have often recorded alone, I still feel the best music is made by musicians playing off each other.

The group-effort sound in recording of 'Sea Lion' is like, you really hear all the people in the room and hear them interlocking. There's a real freight-train energy of all these people at the same time playing.

I've played in bands with A-team players around. But unless they can play together, it doesn't do any good. And you can take guys who may not stand on their own up against a bunch of individuals they might be compared to, but you put 'em together, man, and they are unique unto themselves in a way that no one else can touch.

I'm naturally going to react to that and he'll bring out elements in my musical character that were lying dormant, because I'm relating what he's playing.

As an improviser I'm now pretty comfortable with trios, so I'm thinking of working up to quartets.