Alex Lifeson Quotes

The album's not dead for me; I still buy vinyl albums.

Don't get me wrong: there are aspects of buying music online that I love. Instantly being able to hear a song the moment it crosses your mind? Where's the downside? However, I do feel for those too young to remember the thrill of going record shopping.

I've probably bought ten CDs in my whole life.

You put a song on the record or on tape and you stop singing it. You just don't sit around and sing it anymore unless you're performing. That's kind of sad.

I've seen 13, 14-year-olds opening CDs as though they're records from the 1920s, going 'Look at this - there's a little book!'... That makes me think the format has probably had its day.

The whole experience of getting an album from an artist you like and listening to it from beginning to end is sort of gone. Now it's piecemeal.

The rise of the iPod meant that digital music became the norm, It's sad, but you can still find the real stuff out there if you look for it!

People have got no attention span these days with music - I come from the time where I bought the whole album and listened to it back to back.

I'm listening to Spotify all the time and pulling in different things. I might find an artist or a song that I like, and I'll pull that into playlists, and then you'll find related artists. But I like an album as a nostalgic thing; I remember buying albums and getting into the whole thing.

I'm rarely grabbed by anything the way I was when I was 10 years younger. About the only relatively new artists whose albums I own are Beck, and They Might Be Giants.

Most people didn't have the bandwidth to download whole albums. And so it brought back this cherry picking idea that the audience would focus on certain songs and possibly be the impetus behind what eventually got on AM radio: the single or whatever.

I still love to do the old songs. I know some people don't.

I like everything in this iPhone, iPod world where you can do everything all the time. Back in my time, you bought a vinyl record when you were a kid and took it home, and it took a bit of effort to actually get it out of the thing and not scratch it.

I think it's important for people who love music to retain physical CDs or even vinyl, because it sounds so great and so much warmer than music over the internet.

You used to have to sing and convey emotion, and now, well, technically you can do anything with technology. It sucks for music today, but that's why that old music feels so good to me.

Rock and roll music - people want records. For me, it's the whole thing - the package. I don't get satisfaction from buying an MP3.

I think that if people realize that with an mp3, you're only getting five percent of the sound that's there. But when you hear the entire thing... I think it would save the music business. It's such a drastic change.

I've noticed more people coming to shows and I've had a feeling that they were from a part of the culture I haven't been able to get to before, younger people. I think on iTunes they've been experimenting with my songs and the digital radio world has been very kind to me.

I guess the idea of doing albums in their entirety, in sequence, appeals to people. I guess it's the memory of being able to hear the music in the way it was originally presented.

I keep on calling them records because they will always be records to me.

When I was younger, I'd buy a vinyl album, take it home and live with it, and I think that attachment's largely gone for the file-sharing generation.

It's a sad state when more people retweet than buy records.

I understand that people want to just listen to a track and put it on their iPod, and that's fine, there's nothing wrong with that, but why can't that exist hand in hand with an album? They're such different experiences.

I still love physical product. I still hold out for actual CDs, because in radio, everyone just wants to send you a file to play.

My first albums as a little kid were Elton John's 'Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,' Simon and Garfunkel's 'Greatest Hits' - and 'Workingman's Dead.' How many other people still listen to the music they liked at age 12?