Layne Staley Quotes

I prefer to read into other people's songs what I want to hear in them.

Music has as many roles as people make it.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

My songs are a direct route into my brain and my heart.

Well, I make every song I sing personal. I've never chosen a song that wasn't.

With most of the songs and music that I've composed, irrespective of the myriad videos made, I was always careful not to overly define the experience, leaving room for people to internalize things for themselves, making their experience more integral.

A lot of the songs on '2' are pretty personal, but even if I'm writing about something like that, I still tend to keep it pretty simple and open-ended. I like the idea of people listening to my album and it meaning something to me but maybe meaning something else to them.

I always hate explaining away songs, because for me they mean something, and for other people, they'll mean something absolutely different.

What I like doing is imagery that can be interpreted in any particular way by the person who wears it.

For me the meaning of my work is much more fluid.

People relate to songs so differently. No matter what it's about in reality, people create their own meaning behind it and connect with it on their own terms.

Generally, if I read something that I think is really good and that I feel a connection with and is right for me, I see and hear who the guy is, as manifested by me.

I won't get into it any more than to say that there are parts of me in all the songs that I write.

You finish a film not in the editing, but in the conversations that audiences have with themselves - and in that sense, every viewer is making a slightly different film. And that's wonderful.

The great thing about a record is it frees your imagination; it gives your eyes a rest and lets your mind wander. There's the special thing that each record can mean a different thing to every person listening to it.

I don't want to tell fans what to think or what to believe or whatever, but at the same time, some things just hit you very personally.

Don't worry about how you 'should' draw it. Just draw it the way you see it.

I'm also not going to explain something just because I said it in a rap. Take what you want from it.

People used to say nobody can sing my songs but me - they're too personal.

Everybody's going to approach a character differently, depending upon what they bring to it on their own intellectual level or their feelings from their heart and soul.

I feel I'm all over my movies. I know my movies are all over me.

I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.

Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life.

I'm doing things that are more artistic again, more close to the material that I love. I don't disparage those things that I did. They're just not as much reflective of who I am.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.