John Fahey Quotes

Ultimately, you're looking for a soulful experience when you listen to any form music.

Nothing recalls the past like music.

We would liken music to Aladdin's lamp — worthless in itself, not so for the spirits which obey its call. We love it for the buried hopes, the garnered memories, the tender feelings, it can summon with a touch.

When the intellectual part of guitar playing overrides the spiritual, you don't get to extreme heights.

Pick up my guitar and play, just like yesterday / And I get on my knees and pray.

Papa sat with me tonight. He brought the accordion down and sat close to where Max used to sit. I often look at his fingers and face when he plays. the accordion breathes. There are lines on his cheeks. They look drawn on, and for some reason, when I see them, I want to cry. It is not for any sadness or pride. I just like the way they move and change. Sometimes I think my papa is an accordion. When he looks at me and smiles and breathes, I hear the notes.

I find that Bach is appealing to a lot of different audiences. It really hits people at their core in different ways, but it also creates a meditative space. I just feel like I can play it, and it reaches people.

Music, for me, is the most sacred of the arts. I say that because music communicates in a way that no other art form can. All great art has a spirit that we recognize and appreciate, but music goes directly to your heart.

My first memory of guitar was seeing my father play one.

My goal in music is to create nostalgic moments.

You cannot have black music without something soulful in it, whether it's lyrically, how it's performed, or how it's expressed.

It's hard to explain music when it goes in your gut and makes left and right and turns and moves you and resonates with you.

A few things I've noticed about myself as a listener, and the music that I relate to and the music that's continued to mean something to me since I was a little kid or a teenager, is that they're songs that tell stories and songs that come from a place of experience.

With good music, yes, we can bring people together because a good song will touch your soul no matter what and where it is coming from.

There's so much nostalgia for music from the past.

I don't know if, in a previous life, I was, like, the embodiment of a guitar, because any time someone plays a guitar with the licks, I just resonate to it.

There are friends with whom we share neither interests nor any particular experiences, friends with whom we never correspond, whom we seldom meet and then only by chance, but whose existence nonetheless has for us a special if uncanny meaning. For me the Eiffel Tower is just such a friend, and not merely because it happens to be the symbol of a city, for Paris leaves me neither hot nor cold. I first became aware of this attachment of mine when reading in the paper about plans for its demolition, the mere thought of which filled me with alarm.

Are there not some places where we seem to breathe sadness? — why, we cannot tell. It is a chain of recollections — an idea which carries you back to other times, to other places — which, very likely, have no connection with the present time and place.

Tonight, I feel like my whole body is made out of memories. I'm a mix-tape, a cassette that's been rewound so many times you can hear the fingerprints smudged on the tape.

Jazz is something that you have to feel. It's something that you have to live.

And I'm moved, it's so beautiful. Not what I wrote, but to have it given back like this. To have her remember the words and the tune. To hear it in her voice.

I had a guitar leaning against the wall and I'd squint at it. It was almost like a dog that had been kicked - I didn't think I had anything to offer it.

It's wonderful that whenever Patsy Cline's name is mentioned, people's voices fall and they become right sentimental. And, rightly so.

If you ask me, music is the language of memory

Nothing connects to the moment like music. I count the music to bring me back, or more precisely, to bring her forward.