Ravi Shankar Quotes

A great song is one that is around even when I'm not.

When music is crashing around us, when you hear the same five songs on the radio that aren't really saying much, we can always go back to great music. Great music always lives on.

I don't know if One Direction will stand the test of time. I have a niece who goes crazy for them. But the only way to judge art is to wait and see if it becomes evergreen. This takes a bit of time. Adele is a very good musician and I'd like to sing with her. But, again, time will tell if her music will become evergreen.

Great songs stand out wherever they're from.

Guitar music or rock n' roll or whatever you want to call it sort of goes away with trends, but it'll never go away completely. It can't die because it's so fundamentally attractive.

Music isn't like news, where it's what happened five minutes ago or even 10 seconds ago that matters. With music, a song from the 1960s could be as relevant to someone today as the latest Ke$ha song.

Good music will always be recognized in the end.

To me, there's two kinds of music these days. There's ephemeral music, and there's music that has lasting power and depth.

People like Prince don't have to care about anything, but they care because they want music for the future to be great.

Great music was written by the great geniuses, and you want to do it justice.

There will always be rock stars, but I don't know how much depth and longevity they'll have.

Great music is great music, period.

I try to make sure that I make music that can stand the test of time.

Dick Clark was a really great influence in my career; he helped me a lot with his whole organization, and they were awesome to me at all different points - but one thing that I really disagreed with him on was when he said that what I do, pop music, is a disposable art form.

Soul music is about longevity and reaching and touching people on a human level - and that's never going to get lost.

I think that there's always great music being made. Always has been, always will be.

There are times when what's happening in rock is the best music in the world, and there are times when there is nothing worthwhile at all.

I felt I had an opportunity to follow in the footsteps of great soul musicians of the past, who made a lot of social and political commentary through their music.

When I'm dead, I wanna leave a body of work, like authors or great painters do. I don't wanna get ideas above my station, but why shouldn't this be comparable? Pop music was supposed to be a flash in the pan, but here we are 50 years later, and it means something to us, and it always will do. It's incredibly important.

We've always prided ourselves on making a record that we want to feel proud of, ones that are hopefully timeless so they can be around for a long time.

Adele ultimately did well in such a large way because she affects everybody, and the way that she writes seems to be popular music, not because of her skin color but because she writes great music, and it's popular in that way.

It would be amazing to write a song that could be sung 100 years from now by a teenage girl and still be relevant to her - that's a dream of songwriting, maybe.

I like to make songs that are gonna be here for a long time, not for five months that they play on the radio.

The most important thing is to make quality music that will last.

The Beatles are the classical music of rock n' roll. And rock n' roll is far more widespread than classical will ever be.