Jon Landau Quotes

The most important thing is that you honor that musical integrity, whether you make music that sounds like ABBA or you make music that sounds like Void.

Few of us boggle - though we should - at the fact that Louis Armstrong sang and played trumpet with similar panache, or that Leonard Bernstein and Benjamin Britten were equally adept as composers, conductors and pianists.

I'm in a position where, theoretically, I could play the same ten concertos and make a very good living bouncing around playing Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky and Barber, but I really think artists should keep pushing limits and trying new things.

I wanted to make good records. But my problem is I've got a low boredom threshold, so I wanted it to look and sound different with each album, which is really tantamount to suicide, cause people lose it, they lose it - they say: 'I like that, and that's not this.'

Since music has never had a Rembrandt, we have remained nothing more than musicians.

I mean, Tool has a style, but we try to make all our songs sound different from each other.

I hope that I can make good music out of whatever genre I go into. Just to prove to myself that I can.

There used to be a certain condescension to Mozart. His music was regarded as pleasant. He was a porcelain figure playing a porcelain harpsichord.

All roads for me lead back to Mozart. In his tragically short life, he breathed new life, fire and meaning into every form of music that existed in his time.

I make a timeless music. I think I've made my mark as a lyricist and as an innovator and as a tastemaker.

Dream Theater has never been a band that hit at a particular fashionable point and said, 'OK, that's basically it.'

Just based on the primary adage of the necessity breeding innovation, it was just like 'Well, what makes me the guitar player that I am?' and I feel like I listen to so much different music, and I'm a student of so many genres of music, and I feel like it's fun to apply those things and anything super applicable to any type of music.

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

I don't want to be known for only making ratchet music.

Mozart, who was buried in a pauper’s grave, was one of the greatest successes we know of, a man who in his early thirties had poured out his inexhaustible gift of music, leaving the world richer because he had passed that way. To leave the world richer—that is the ultimate success.

I haven't heard anything so great for a long time; Beethoven snaps his fingers at the whole world.

I don't want the World Dream Orchestra to be like a dessert whose taste is instantly forgotten as soon as you leave the restaurant.

I love to play guitar. I've never really been the type of guitar player that goes, 'I'll only play this style of music or that thing.'

Blues purists may hate what I do sometimes because it's a little dirtier.

We're able to play different genres and be very specific in sounding like we know what we're doing.

I feel like that's what's going to be most respected at the end of the day, that I'm able to do so many different things and become less of a rapper and just more as a musician.

My mom was obsessed with Joni Mitchell; I grew up listening to so much of her music. But it was never a prerogative to emulate her.

I think I have the capability to make music different from what I have already released. There are ghazals and other songs that I can create. There is no stopping me though.

You want to make a record that stands the test of time and that people enjoy.

Branching out to other genres - I think it's why people put me apart from other guitar instrumentalists.