Nick Mason Quotes

I do not like people writing songs and then other people singing them. A lot of people don't even sing their own songs anymore. It's like producers these days have ghost producers; 'I don't produce, but I am a producer.'

David Lee Roth had the idea that if you covered a successful song, you were half way home. C'mon - Van Halen doing 'Dancing in the Streets'? It was stupid. I started feeling like I would rather bomb playing my own songs than be successful playing someone else's music.

Don't try to follow any trends, just concentrate on writing great songs and knowing your instrument. All the other stuff will fall into place.

I write my songs and just play them, so there are not a whole lot of fireworks. As long as the music comes first, it's OK to have some fireworks. But not the other way around.

I fear becoming formulaic. Some of my books are.

If there was a direct influence on a song, I never hid it.

You can only really sing about what you know; at least, I can.

There's a lot of vulnerability in songs - I'm not talking about pop songs - from people that are in the art of songwriting more than the commercial enterprise of it.

We don't want to become like country artists where there's a formula.

I'm kind of a perfectionist about my songwriting. If I don't mean it, I don't think it's any good.

I don't know if I could write a pop song without at least a little touch of bite in it, and it's usually not a bite that most people would want to sing.

I'd advise all you songwriters out there, if you're getting into it for the business, go home and get a job digging ditches or something. Get a life. You'll learn a lot more, and you won't write a lot of rotten poetry.

Whenever you think you're writing what other people want to hear from you, and that it'll be commercial, you're doomed to disaster. Writing has to be as truthful and specific as we can make it. The minute we think that we're reaching more people and pleasing them, we get general. And audiences sense that and turn away, shun us.

The music business is really, really small. The real music is becoming almost extinct, if you don't stay true to who you are.

The last thing you want to do is write songs about being in a band.

Usually it seems like either you sacrifice something and a lot of people will pay attention, or you stay true to yourself and appeal to a smaller group of people, but now we've managed to do what we felt was the right thing to do in our heart and had it reach a wide audience. It feels very rare.

I've always been noted for being original and doing different thing. So for me to hop on the train that's going on would be - shoot, if I wanted to hop on the train, I might as well have hopped on gangsta rap back when it was popular and tried to do that.

Honest songs aren't written for money.

No man who values originality will ever be original. But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work's sake, and what men call originality will come unsought.

Art is either revolution or plagiarism

If I thought that any poem of mine could have been written by anyone else, either a contemporary or a forerunner, I should suppress it with a blush; and I should do the same if I ever found I were imitating myself. Every poem should be new, unexpected, inimitable, and incapable of being parodied.

No matter what you do, it can't be perfect. I told Jack White, 'If I'd 'a sung that song more'n twice, it might of sounded better.' He said, 'Well, it might not of. You might have took the spark out of it.' I don't know if he has a point or not. We'll find out.

The writers who have nothing to say, are the ones you can buy, the others have too high a price.

No 'mise en scène' has the right to be repeated, just as no two personalities are ever the same. As soon as a 'mise en scène' turns into a sign, a cliché, a concept however original it may be, then the whole thing - characters, situation, psychology - become schematic and false.

You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.