Ry Cooder Quotes

To me, using music is creating a shorthand with an audience. And I love music so much.

So the language of musical harmony is an absolutely extraordinary one. It's a way of navigating one's emotional frameworks, but without the need to put things into words, and I think that, as with many other languages, it doesn't matter how much you know about a language.

You know, I think music is very interactive. It's a - it's a language.

Music is its own language - if you don't speak it, it's hard to say what you're trying to do.

Sure, I love people, and I want to communicate with people. I mean, what is music anyway? It's a form of communication - at least for me it is. And that's why I play the kind of music that I think - that I hope - can communicate with people.

All music has to speak in some form or other.

If a composer is to reach his audience emotionally - and surely that's what theatre music is all about - he must reach the people through sounds they can relate to.

I think, in music, you're always hoping that you'll have a like-minded audience and that the music you like making will appeal to them, too.

Music expresses what cannot be put into words I like to think, and I think the band makes a good go at it.

We're looking to help our guitar buddies do their thing while at the same time we try to create something we might enjoy listening to ourselves. If anything we are trying to develop a vocabulary so we can converse more fluidly.

There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It's always been my way of expressing what, for me, is inexpressible by any other means.

I think music is another language.

When you see U2 or the Rolling Stones, after years of knowing each other, they don't have to look at each other to connect.

Music is so intimate and so personal that when you can find somebody that feels the same way about it that you do, it's magic. It can be. It really can be.

When you can make a good, strong musical connection with people, that's always there. That's not often that that happens.

Making music with people is a very intimate process.

Music creates complicity, and then you feel less isolated.

Of course we all know when music's too much in the head, and we define our greatest players by the way they are able to communicate directly from their emotional selves.

If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.

Music is the unspoken language that can convey feelings more accurately than talking ever could.

If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.

There's a different feeling when you've played with musicians for 30 years. A lot of stuff doesn't even need to be said, especially onstage. We just read each other so well.

For me, the conductor is a person who interprets along with me, and we interpret things together.

Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.

There's a kind of intimacy that can happen between musicians, and if they're people you enjoy and respect as humans, that intimacy is a real privilege.