Edward Abbey Quotes

You can play as good as you want, but you have to sing from a place of living.

You can play a shoestring if you're sincere.

If you write songs and if you write music that's very sincere and very honest, it's pop music, but it is pop music with a lot of honesty and a lot of heart.

If I can play one note and make you cry, then that's better than those fancy dancers playing twenty notes.

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.

I listen to all the top 20 songs, and top 20 albums, even the rap albums. But I don't like negative messages. If somebody is putting a lot of ego out there, I don't like it. When I make my records I want it to be sincere.

The way we're going about things and what we want to do, we feel it has to be a really pure essence of music. That's where you get the most out of it.

If you sing honestly and sincerely to kids, they will respond with all their hearts.

I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.

In recitals, you are naked before the audience - well, naked with your jacket and tails. The audience sees and hears the real person, not some role you are interpreting.

If you can get humor and seriousness at the same time, you've created a special little thing, and that's what I'm looking for, because if you get pompous, you lose everything.

Music is only special when it's coming from a genuine place - it's just energy trapped in a bottle.

I've always wanted to sing. I don't think I have a great voice, but I just think that I get the emotion. It's very authentic. Whatever emotion I'm feeling, I can sing it, and you can feel it.

Fans want real songs, they want real experiences, and they want real instruments.

Kids are the most genuine thing to me: everything they say and do, they mean it.

You don't play around with a good song. You try to just say it right in the proper place, and if you get the music and voice in tune, you'll be all right. That's always worked for me.

All I know is real life. I don't know how to act. I don't know how to pretend.

As an artist, I want it to be so simple that anyone can understand it. No matter what age you are, you're going to feel it because it's real. I don't like to sugar coat. There's not too many artists that can tell stories and be vulnerable on the mic.

When I was a kid, all of the parents and grandparents came out of the Depression Era. They were all freezing bread in their freezer, they were covering their sofas with plastic, and they had plastic runners on the floor. There was a great distance between them and anything authentic.

My devils and angels, fears and hopes, insights and stupidities, loves and loathings, are what they are. I don't edit them out so much as try to make them interesting - whether I am talking to you, or writing a poem, or joking with my kids, or speaking on television.

It is in its pure form that an art hits hard.

It can't be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!

All truths, not merely ideas, but truthful faces, truthful pictures or songs, are highly beautiful.

Sometimes the lines in a song are lines you wish you could text-message somebody in real life.

"The way I feel about music -- any song, any style -- is that there is no right and wrong, only true and false. If the music and lyrics are conceived out of honesty and if the production of the song goes along with its original message, then what has been expressed is art, regardless of what anyone's opinion is of it. So things are a lots impler if you just tell the truth.