Will Champlin Quotes

I would love to do much more singing; it's just one of those things where I can't quite describe what it feels like when you're standing in front of a forty piece orchestra, and there's nothing between you and an audience but a microphone. It's like strapping yourself to a locomotive, and I love it.

Intimacy comes from being yourself on the stage and making the audience feel, without trying, that you're sittin' down there with 'em, playing, and that can happen in a big hall, if you have a good audience that want to listen.

And being away and not performing for a long time and really connecting with my audience for a long time, I have a great responsibility to myself and to them to do it exactly the way the process was when I was young.

I love writing songs and being a musician, but you can't really buy the feeling of connecting with people.

'm not saying I would never do acting again, because I love it, but there really is nothing compared to getting up in front of people and singing your music.

You don't want to go and make something, then go out and do shows, if you're not really into it. You don't want to go out there and make people feel like you're grudging playing them a song. That's a disturbing thought.

You try to stay in the moment and act like you're singing the song for the first time. You try to have a good time yourself. That's the most important thing. If you're having a good time, people will join you.

When you're playing music and you're starting to expose yourself for the first time, there's nothing more powerful than being listened to and being actually heard.

One of the hardest things in the world is to perform on record and get someone to enjoy and feel what you're doing. It's unlike, like TV you can, you can fake it with the face and the crying and the bits. Recording is completely different.

In the same way that I'm open when I speak, I'm that open on stage. I feed off the energy of the audience, too, so they're feeling what I'm feeling.

I don't think I'm an entertainer. I never think, 'Wow, I can't wait to get the crowd moving.' Some of my favorite bands never moved an inch.

I wasn't playing the music, the music was playing me... and once that went away, and I had the feeling I was playing music, I had to stop. The need to go onstage and get my brain flattened every night left me, and what I didn't wanna do is go onstage and perpetrate a fraud... You cannot fool an audience.

When I go to a gig and I hear a song that I really like, a song that hits home to me or hits an emotional nerve, if I could ever recreate that for someone, that would be the ultimate goal.

I went from a playing in a bar on a bar stool for free beer and tip money, where people weren't paying attention to me, to now I've got their attention. It's up to me to what I feed them with my music. It's up to me how I do that. I've put a lot of thought into how great the songs are, and how I want people to perceive me.

I don't write songs thinking about formats, where is it going to get played, who am I gonna please, what's the outlet for it.

Write your own songs. It helps you to mean what you're singing, which will then make it mean something to listeners.

All my life I wanted to play music with love to every member of the audience.

People want to see musicians sing things that come from their own mind and own heart in real time, responding to the moment for them.

Starting in music, where I get a chance to connect with the lyrics of a song, I learned so much about performing on stage and connecting to your audience and to what you're singing about. Singing is very emotional. Every song has its own purpose.

To see fans singing your songs back to you is an indescribable thing.

But I always communicate with the audience. I never pretend like I'm just in my bedroom making a track. The whole point of doing a gig is, like, a feedback thing between you and the audience.

Playing live is such a total visceral experience, and really, as a musician, you're trained from the beginning to be a live performer.

I connect emotionally to these songs. I mean what I say when I say it, and that allows your audience to connect. That's the number-one reason why any music is successful, because you make people feel something.

For me, performing is the biggest part of being a rapper. There's nothing like the feeling of screaming your story to people.

As a songwriter, it's very hard to listen to music that's not coming from the heart and soul, personally.