Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Quotes

A lot of people play to impress, but the really gifted ones play to move. That's the greatest point of ever doing this.

When the intellectual part of guitar playing overrides the spiritual, you don't get to extreme heights.

Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.

I tend to like songs that are very emotional, that strike a chord with me emotionally.

Depth on different levels is so important to me. You look at a band like The Beatles, all their material has so much depth to it. And I want people to be able to run away with my melodies and get lost in them and take the lyrics and be able to relate to them.

I still get a chill when I sing, 'You Don't Own Me.' I find some new feeling in it every time.

In music, you feel a connection to the voice and think about the person behind it. In art that's secondary.

In chamber music, the audience can hear each instrument and understand (and feel) what the composer and the musicians have in mind as they play.

There's something in music that fascinates me - how it communicates emotion so immediately. That's something I wanted in my paintings.

As a musician, you never understand why people connect with certain songs.

When a singer truly feels and experiences what the music is all about, the words will automatically ring true.

I wanted to get to that aesthetic proposition that comes out of learning the human elements of a world, so that those notes and rhythms mean something to you besides just the academic way in which they fall in place.

Each time I play a song it seems more real.

I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions.

It's nice to see people invest in what you do as an artist and sing the songs back at you and feel something. You get to feel something more than what you were feeling when you made the record.

That's the ideal to me - to make music that is well-crafted and sophisticated technically, but has a soul and a heart that touches a lot of people.

There is no such thing as human perfection, and yet when you hear Lataji sing, you wonder how she sang that song so beautifully, so perfectly. Or, how Kumar Gandharva touched your soul so powerfully.

We love high-end art, but when you're looking at high-end art in music, a lot of the time, it's appreciated academically, but you can't feel it as much.

My primary goal is always to tell a story that will resonate with people on a deeply emotional level.

Piano playing consists of common sense, heart and technical resources. All three should be equally developed. Without common sense you are a fiasco, without technique an amateur, without heart a machine. The profession does have its hazards.

If I have to hold a note for a long time, I imagine it as moving and spinning, for the note has to have life. In a way, a singer actually refreshes a note with every beat that it's held.

Technically, I'm not a guitar player, all I play is truth and emotion.

It's far easier to write why something is terrible than why it's good. If you're reviewing a film and you decide "This is a movie I don't like," basically you can take every element of the film and find the obvious flaw, or argue that it seems ridiculous, or like a parody of itself, or that it's not as good as something similar that was done in a previous film. What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive.

I still perform because it's a necessity for my innards. And those songs, some of those songs, I have sung, I don't know how many thousands of times. And I promise you, every single solitary night, they're new to me. They are brand-new to me that night.

My chops were not as fast... [but] I just learned more on what was in my mind than what was in my chops. I learned a long time ago that one note can go a long way if it's the right one, and it will probably whip the guy with twenty notes