John Otto Quotes

When you're in a band and there's five of you, you have to accommodate five people in every song.

Being in a band is always a compromise. Provided that the balance is good, what you lose in compromise, you gain by collaboration.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

In music, what is very important is temporality of space and length, based on the breathing space the director gives the music within the film, by separating the music from various elements of reality, like noises, dialogues... That's how you treat music properly, but it doesn't always happen this way. Music is often blamed, but it's not its fault.

I tell everybody, if you've got a band that works, it's a miracle. It's never going to be perfect, but if it works on some level, hold on to it with both hands and don't ever let it go.

Being the drummer of Fall Out Boy, and any other project I've ever done, is most importantly about playing for the music. Staying out of the way when it's needed and playing more when it makes sense.

To me, I always felt like drums have to be the support and the driving factor in a song, and there's places where the drummer has to show off and do things and get the spotlight, but not all the time. You've gotta pick and choose. And it's always gotta be about the song. That's really the bottom line.

I've been in very many situations where I've not liked the other members of the band or they have not liked me. I grew up presuming that's the way music was made. It doesn't need to be that way. It's taken me years years to find that out.

What a good session musician does is listen to the song, to the artist, and to the other players. That way you can help bring out the song and help the artist express what they want to express. It's never about you stepping out and showing you can play something fancy.

And I've also come to the conclusion that, as far as guitar solos and things like that are concerned, it's more important to complement the music rather than take away from it.

A bass player has to think and play like a bass player. A drummer has to play and think like a drummer, and stay out of the way of the vocalist. The guitar player has to respect everybody else.

Bands are about these little relationships that make everything tick, and when you create new music you're testing those relationships.

So I am one of those bass players who can do something and musically, it was back then and now it is even more, if you noticed on the new album, I am not playing all the time anymore.

And you don't want to just totally mess up the rhythm when you're playing with Bob Dylan.

You can play the piano with the white keys only or you can play it with only the black keys. But for harmony you must use the black and the white keys.

I've become more interested in creating a band sound than trying to outshine the other guys.

With all the different guys in the band and all the different ideas of what's what, it's hard to get everybody on the same page sometimes. We are a very tight brotherhood, but we never know what we're going to do.

You can have the best riff in the world, but if the drums behind it just ain't vibing it, it's not gonna be the greatest riff, right? So you've gotta have someone there that can really bring that to life.

There's a very collaborative, collective attitude. That's a very female principle. We try to nurture that aspect of the band.

I always maintain that playing in an orchestra intelligently is the best school for democracy. If you play a solo, the conductor and everybody in the orchestra follows you. Then, a few bars later, the main voice goes to another instrument, another group, and then you have to go back into the collective [sound]. The art of playing in an orchestra is being able to express yourself to the maximum but always in relation to something else that is going on.

Amaal is a music composer, and I am singer, so I think we compliment each other rather than competing with each other.

Just have to be smart. Can't hurt your team.

I always say my role in Metallica is to support the song and to support my team, and whatever that means, I'm there for it.

I've learned how to trust someone else's ideas with mine.

Katya and I, as a yin and a yang, we pretty much represent the entire, full gambit of talent, you know? Together, there's not really much we can't do.