Eddie Van Halen Quotes

There's been a progression in my sound.

We started the band when I was about 19 or 20. At that age, it would have been kind of hard to imagine a lot of the stuff that I've written. We were playing garage rock. I wanted to dash out three chords and scream. But if you do that for 20 years, what's the point?

When Kenny first came to me, I think he was thinking of making a nice little folk record, but in my opinion, folk music had come to an end and I felt he needed to go to the next step, the next generation.

I'm really maturing into soul music. It's not my attempt or karaoke try. I feel like I really embody the music now that I am 36.

The way I evolved was playing straight-ahead jazz into playing more fusion-type stuff just because I was young enough to get into it. As I get older, I find myself coming back to where I kind of started.

As you grow older, your music begins to mature and grow older along with you.

You have to grow with the music.

I think the music that I'm writing and the stuff I'm going to do as I age will age.

The music is the same if you go all the way back to the first albums I made or the middle or whatever. The thing that's different is the lyrics.

You could say, 'Oh, we're gonna write the heaviest album of all time' or 'We're gonna write an album that sounds like 'Iowa.'' Even if we set out to try to do so, it would never compare. We're not those people anymore, we're not that band anymore.

The first song that I wrote that I was proud of was probably 'Hunter' from the first record. But I listen that now and I don't know. I mean, it's got a good hook, but still. I'm proud of it. I'm as proud as I can be of all the ideas, but I think 'Party' showed a maturity that I don't think I had on 'Aldous Harding.'

A lot of the songs that I wrote during 'Pt. 1' and 'Pt. 2' are the first songs that I ever wrote that sounded like that. I was in this phase - a certain creative space in my life - personally and musically.

I think that the only goals that we try to set for ourselves is to evolve musically.

We'll see some simplistic players for a while, who'll then get into more complicated things and evolve with their instruments. This is a cycle that happens over and over again in music.

I think that every band tries to mature their sound through their existence, you know?

There are a lot of people holding on to the old Jessie J - whatever that means - but I think there's a lot more people realizing what I'm about. I think people like it.

Music changes, and I'm gonna change right along with it.

It accumulates over the years and I've led so many bands of my own now and forced myself into new situations... You would hope that you play better and better - until you just get too feeble to do it anymore.

There are musicians who go through their lives sort of shedding their skins. For me, I've always felt backward-compatible to Version 1.0.

Songs are really interesting in that way. Sometimes, they grow with you. Sometimes, you outgrow them.

But I listen to live recordings of things that I did back in the '70s and then how I've done things since. And there's no doubt about it: if I compare the two, it's like chalk and cheese.

It's like with me, I feel like I was never one of those rappers that, you know, stayed in one time warp.

I think it took me until - my twenties were really a time of exploration and experimentation with different groups and different types of music. Then I kind of developed the sound, which first appeared, I guess, on my first solo album 'Englaborn,' which came out in 2001.

We're still evolving as a band. I think that's really important for a band to do, especially after being around for so many years.

If you've followed us from when we started playing live in October 2010, you will notice that there has been numerous changes over the years.