Jason Molina Quotes

We were playing popular music, but we were doing our own arrangements because we were too lazy to sit down and figure out the originals.

Music expresses what cannot be put into words I like to think, and I think the band makes a good go at it.

I try to make music, all kinds of music, whether it be singing or rapping.

When I sing, it's different from when I speak in a very interesting way. I think that, when you're singing, a message is carried in a different way. I don't know if that emotion needs a melody.

I will safely say that I prefer singing a song in a stretch if I am allowed to. A lot of times, I do choose to and do sing the asthayi and antara in one take, respectively. And I give a few takes until I feel it is perfect.

The way I was singing the songs was jazz

When it comes to songs and music, yeah, people love to sing and dance and play music and tunes, and that stream of consciousness that exists in music, nobody knows where that comes from.

For me, singing was always about the lyrics. I'm hopeless at singing songs that don't have a core.

I started singing rhythmically, and now I'm learning from Otis Redding to push a song instead of just sliding over it

All you gotta do is think of the song in your head. And it doesn't matter whether you can play it or not, you can get somebody to play it. With songs I've written, there's a song called "The Statue", which I can't play. There are songs that I've written that I've actually just hummed on - there's a song on one of the albums they have there on the Internet called "My Love Was True" and it's almost operatic. I can't play it. But I can sing it.

Guy Picciotto had a really sound point: Live albums basically have bands playing songs that are available on studio records, and what example can you think of where the live album is better? What are the great live albums? I have live albums of bands, but I wouldn't listen to them for the most part. So we thought, instead of spending energy trying to puzzle out how to create a live record, let's just write another studio record.

I studied other singers, so I would learn how to phrase, and learn how to breathe. And the main thing was, I learned how to inhabit my song.

My voice is my instrument. ... It is not in the throat, from where it appears to come. It is in my feet and how they touch the floor, in my legs and how they lift and sink with the rhythm of the song. It is in my hips and belly and lower back.

I am a moderately good singer. I am not a great singer but I can interpret a song, which I don't think is quite the same as singing it.

Eventually I had so many little melodies and ideas that, you know, that they were all songs to me and I threw in a few cover songs like Enya's "Watermark," Bach, and my dad's song, "Song for the Whales."

The essential thing is to WANT to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.

I have a good friend, Rudolf Serkin, the pianist, a very sensitive man. I was talking to him one day backstage after a concert and I told him that I thought he had played particularly sensitively that day. I said, "You know, many pianists are brilliant, they strike the keys so well, but somehow you are different." "Ah," he said, "I don't think you should ever strike a key. You should pull the keys with your fingers."

I learned how to be more theatrical and have more fun, and to take a song and sing it over and over again in different ways, and make it different each time. I'm not just singing the song - it's this thing that's affecting me.

I love hearing strong, confident beats in music because I love to dance. At the same time, melody is really important to me because I love singing.

I had this talent for these stupid little teenage songs. I just couldn't get anyone to sing my songs, so I had to sing my own tunes.

Music helps define the character and is an extension of the character somehow, so that you are able to use both the songs themselves and the way that you sing them to tell something about the character and his story, as well as develop a performance style.

I've written arrangements for choirs and strings in the past, but I usually write music with my voice or a keyboard and then I'll get someone who is good at writing scores to write it out. Or, if I have the luxury of time, I will go in a room and hear the people perform and then change it through what I hear, not on paper. I can read music OK, but I probably rebelled a little - music changes into something else when you read it.

It is never about how good your voice is; it is only about feeling the urge to sing, and then having the courage to do it with the voice you are given.

Well first of all, I'm a singer. I sing since I talk. So the great ballad singers, the people that sang with so much feeling, jazz, blues, all those singers, they were songs that I listened to, records that my mom played for me, and then later I bought.

They both sang. My grandmother had a very haunted mountain voice and would sing hymns. My grandpa would sing but in a very, very subdued way.