Allan Holdsworth Quotes

When I first came out, country wouldn't touch me because I was way too rock, and rock wouldn't touch me because I was definitely country.

I don't think a song should be put in a category.

They believed you can't mix rock, country, and rap, and that crossover is dead. I always knew it would work. And it will always work as long as you're really into it and like what you're doing.

It can be a bit frustrating to always get the soft-rock stamp.

Some people say I make hip-hop. Others see me as doing EDM. Some people might look at me as a trap artist, but I'm not really stuck to any of those.

I keep my hip-hop as hip-hop, my R&B as R&B and my pop as pop. The ability to cross those boundaries and do all these things effectively is not commonly done.

People grapple with labeling me as hip-hop, R&B, or pop, and it's interesting to me. I'm just making music.

I've been criticized for doing so - crossover music. But I never claimed to be a pure dancehall artist.

Whichever chord progressions move me, whether it's rock, jazz, doo-wop or soul, I'm going to put it together and not be worried about whether people can put it in a lane or not.

I really like a lot of American country stuff, so my music has that influence, but I don't like to be set within a genre. It feels very limiting.

When we started Poco, we were too country for rock, and we were too rock for country.

I guess one thing that makes my music stand out is that it is quite hard to determine what genre it is.

This genre of music seems to want to push people into a certain time slot, which is unfortunate.

My music has always been sort of in between categories. Sometimes record stores - back when there were record stores - they'd put my records in the country music section, but other record stores would put my records in the pop or even the rock section. As long as it's in the store somewhere, I'm OK with it.

To break R&B into subcategories does a disservice to the music. I like to live in a zone where I can do whatever I want, where I don't have to worry about genre.

I've always tried to stay clear of being labeled, putting a label on what type of music that I make.

Where do you even draw the line between genres?

I just loved classical music, but I also loved playing rock guitar, and I loved playing piano, so it was a natural thing that those things would merge at some point.

I tend to not want to put labels or categories on the music, only because people come with preconceived ideas about what they're going to hear, or won't come for this reason.

Taxi drivers used to ask me what kind of music I did, and I'd say, 'Well, it's kind of jazz, soul, classical' - but that makes no sense to anyone.

The biggest misconception about us is that we're just a rock band. We think our music is a cross-section of many genres; a hybrid of what the six of us have grown up on.

The way popular music is categorized and formatted cuts down on everyone's options. And although people don't talk about it, there are a lot of issues of race determining musical categories of what's rock, R&B, or even folk. It ends up restricting creativity.

I have a very pop voice, but there's so much of me I associate mostly with urban music, so I try to blend the two.

One of my problems is I'm not really sure if I slot into rock or not. I've always tried to combine world music, folk, jazz, blues and rock, and have done since Traffic.

I genre-hop quite a lot. I love manipulating genre and deconstructing it and making it irrelevant. Genreless music is great because it means you get to write in any genre that you like.