Pete Seeger Quotes

We play melodic music, we play songs, we play all kinds of things and when you improvise you don't just shut out different languages, you use all the languages that you have.

I might sing a gospel song in Arabic or do something in Hebrew. I want to mix it up and do it differently than one might imagine.

I don't kind of want to be known as a one-trick pony who just does the adult-alternative song once a year that makes it onto the radio and people sort of think it's nice.

I think a lot of the intention of bands, especially in the last year, is to spread themselves out geographically and borrow from different cultures and different sounds, and to be eclectic. And that's great in terms of dynamics, but it also tends to not have that torpedo and fire running through it. If you're spreading yourself out across the globe, you're also not emphasizing a singular point, which I think great rock music has always done.

Spanglish is a creative way also of saying, 'I am an American, and I have my own style, my own taste, my own tongue.'

Growing up in a house where there was a lot of different musical influences - my mom listens to soul stuff and Top 40, my sisters would listen to hip-hop - and the church, I grew up listening to a lot of gospel stuff. So I think that plays a role in how I make music now because my music has a lot of range. I don't just do one thing.

It's very natural for me to sing in English and have a tabla in an arrangement, to have hip-hop beats but sing in Tamil. It's very niche but I love doing it.

Come now: Do we really think that the gods are everywhere called by the same names by which they are addressed by us? But the gods have as many names as there are languages among humans. For it is not with the gods as with you: you are Velleius wherever you go, but Vulcan is not Vulcan in Italy and in Africa and in Spain.

I think that if they want people to listen to ten or twelve songs, they have to give the listener a reason to listen to ten or twelve songs or to buy ten or twelve and listen to the whole thing instead of just pulling one or two for their iPod or their computer.

I think it's just a conglomerate of everybody's influences that comes out on the record, and live as well.

Through the years I've accumulated this big bag of songs. When I go out I do close to two hours, and it's all just attitude - and up-tempo. I've accumulated so many of those types of songs now that the show just gets off with a bang, and I'll only do two or three ballads the whole show.

I think it's good to have an old fashioned musical as well as new musicals. There's a lot of room for different shows.

I think they've got 250 languages in Nigeria, and so English is a sort of lingua franca between the 250 languages.

I don't really think of Dire Straits as a sound, you know. It. just depends on the song, and the stuff we're doing is so varied.

For every Foo Fighters record, we've had two or three beautiful, acoustic-based songs, but they never usually make their way to the record, because we want to make rock records.

I think it's good for anybody to learn languages. Americans are particularly limited in that way. Europeans less so... We're beginning to have Spanish move in on English in the states because of all the people coming from Hispanic countries... and we're beginning to learn some Spanish. And I think that's a good thing... Only having one language is very limiting... You get to think that's the way the human race is made; there's only one language worth speaking... Well, this isn't good for English.

I got an email from my dad after the Super Bowl, and he was like, "Will you send me all of the Beyoncé Knowles songs that you have on your computer?" I'm like, "You never listen to Beyoncé. I'm so excited right now." It's good to embrace new things. I like when I can show people that it's not all one genre, and everything is very much inspired by everything else.

I basically love classical music. I love a lot of musicians playing together and the whole culture of that whether it's Indian or it's Western. But in India, I think it's limited to filler music unfortunately. That's one thing I want to push in India where we have the infrastructure of an orchestra where you play Indian melodies with an orchestra and something different for a universal audience. It requires a lot of work from me.

My influences are jazz, blues, European classical music; they are rock music and pop music. So many kinds of music. World music from different countries like India and China. I think that would be a shame not to take advantage and do something... not unique, because I don't have this pretension.

All in all it was my intention to hold both the black and the white clientele by voicing the different kinds of songs in their customary tongues.

I don't think about, "How does this song that has more of an electronic mix prefix to a song that has a full orchestra next to a song that has other things?" I just work on it as-needed.

Republicans who criticize the use of two languages, I think, make a great mistake.

I don't remember half of the new bands, though - and I think that's kind of where we're going. It's turning into just a big derby of songs. May the best song win.

There is not one thing that's Beatle music. How can they talk about it like that? What is Beatle music? Walrus or Penny Lane? Which? It's too diverse: I Want to Hold Your Hand or Revolution Number Nine?

When I went to do "Carson" that night, they wanted us to do two songs, but we were a brand new band. "Conga" hadn't even hit the top 10 yet. They go, "Do you think you could do something that people know, because we want you to do a second song, but not two originals, because we don't want to lose the audience, just in case."