Jean-Michel Jarre Quotes

I had been building electronic musical instruments since I was a kid.

I just want to play music with a band, live.

Playing live was always definitely a lot more fun. You picture it: working alone in the studio eight or 10 hours a day with nobody else there, being frustrated and driven crazy by all of the things that you have to deal with, vs. thousands of people screaming and singing along with you playing.

This current round of gigs, I'm just doing it using pure electronics.

The art of DJing is sharing music with one another... The technology's definitely taking it into a new direction to where it's really becoming performance-based.

I'm also very impressed with the best people in experimental electronic world, like Peta and Eckart Aillers and Finez and Jim O'Rourke and Oren Umbarci and Francesco Lopez. Most of them use the computer as their main instrument.

I still think that I'm playing instruments, not just pushing buttons and there it goes. It's interactive and alive with the sound and the manipulation and it plays like instruments.

The most enjoyable part of my career is singing live.

I really look forward to putting on a record. I love writing music and think that may be my strong suit even more than singing. I can't wait to take that music on tour and share it with as many people as I can.

I grew up around electronic instruments. To me, the turntable is an electronic device. At the same time, I had access to drum machines and keyboards through my uncle; then track recorders into computers. At an early age, I was messing with computers more than most hip-hop musicians.

We were touring the States tied to a load of drum machines and sequencers and synthesizers, playing to hundreds of thousands of people and yet feeling strangely removed from the music.

What it is now is basically, I'll sit on my computer; I basically kind of play the computer as an instrument, I guess you could say. I guess I play the Mac. And how it works is, say - I have a program called 'Ableton Live.' And, you know, you'll open it up, and it's just blank. There's nothing there. And then you start.

In 1983, before computers came along, it wasn't easy to do electronic basslines and rhythms.

I've always been good about interfacing with machines. But that never seemed like a gateway to being able to make music. I never made the connection that music could be made with machines - that was what drum and bass was for me.

It doesn't matter if you load it on a DVD, if you videotape it, it doesn't matter. There's nothing more exciting than being at a live show.

Usually my records are made trying to capture the essence of a band playing in a room.

It's such a big dream of mine to be singing in front of my friends and family in my hometown.

Once you're on, nobody can say, 'Cut it.' You're out there on your own, and there's always that thrill of a real live audience.

It's always important for us to record, so if we're not performing live, that's what we're doing.

The great thing about theater is the doing it again and again and again.

What I do is when I go to the stage I forget about me.

Robert Duvall taught me years ago. He said, "You know theatre is not real. I don't like plays." You know, he doesn't like plays. And I agree with him in certain ways, you know. They can be fun. I don't mind going to see them. I went and saw Phantom of the Opera. I thought hey, that's cool. Look at the mask and all that.

Originally what I used to love was being on a stage and reacting to a live audience and maybe my calling is more in theatre.

I'll always go back to the stage.

The performing part of it, that's what I live for. I've always told people that's what I was born for. I believe, with the proper things around me, and everything I need as a performer; band, and all that kind of stuff, I still feel to this day there's no one that can touch me. Still.