Paul Weller Quotes

I've played in pipe bands in Scotland, and I've always played guitars and drums and stuff.

My favorite instrument is the snare drum. In Scotland, the snare drum is very prominent in Highland bands. The Scottish style of playing is in my blood. It's a very powerful instrument, but it can also be soothing, like velvet. It's a real challenge for composers.

I was very engaged by the folk music movement.Bob Dylan; Joan Baez; Peter, Paul and Mary. And then I sort of discovered world music, and fell in love with ethnic music of all sorts.

My CD collection has a lot of world music - lots of Indian, African, Portuguese, Greek, Italian music. Because of my husband, a lot of jazz, too.

When I hear the bagpipes, it makes the hairs on my neck stand on end. It always makes me weep.

I love the uilleann pipes and listen to Ronan Browne who's an uilleann piper.

So many of the sounds that contemporary composers were trying to create were to be found in the traditional musics of the world. That was encouraging but also little daunting to think that you had to work so hard to be new and yet it was old.

When you've heard one bagpipe tune, you've heard them both.

And it's very strange, but I think there is something very common - not only in Celtic music - but there is a factor or element in Celtic music that is similar in music that we find in Japan, the United States, Europe, and even China and other Asian countries.

I went to school for folk music back when I was a teenager and learned hundreds of songs.

One cannot imagine Scots music and song without the contribution of Burns.

My family making music was like a folk background, really: banging on tabletops, playing banjo and all kinds of things.

I'm a big fan of cultural music, and that's how I try to expand my playing, by listening to music that is not conventionally American.

I love Celtic music and listening to it, but I just don't have the type of voice to sing it.

Certainly my only interest is not in Celtic music.

How can I be a folk? I'm from the suburbs you know.

You know the drum was the first instrument besides the human voice.

I've always been interested in any kind of great music, and African music is, I think, the source of it all.

I really got into Gaelic music and the whole sound of it, and I got to go to Scotland.

I've got this diverse education, growing up in classical music and existing between that and music that is more visceral, so for sure, I've always been interested in music from other cultures.

I was drawn to West Africa. I did listen to a bunch of different styles of African music, and there was something about the percussion and the drums of West Africa, and the energy, that felt so cinematic to me.

There's something about the pipes that just connects with Scots, they go mental for it - it's in our DNA somehow.

Listening to all these different musical genres from all over the world and listening to my father's record collection, the Irish folk influences from home. Of course they're all in there somewhere hiding within the lyrics and melodies. But rap music was the biggest influence on my way of writing and my performing.

Gamelan instruments are exotic and mysterious.

You know there's this really strange mystique about Simon and Garfunkel, when they use the amazing mandolin and all the percussive stuff. It sometimes sounds very global.