Angus Young Quotes

If you go out and just play the old stuff and never write new stuff, you're not really a complete musician, you're a performer.

Rock music is a funny thing: You can actually take it too far sometimes, and then it's not rock music anymore - it's something else, but it's not rock.

The band that changed my life was The Who. It's hard to pick just one album, but if I had to pick the one that really showed me how things could be done, it's 'The Who Sell Out.' They really went to town on that, doing something that no one had ever done before.

Everything I record, I just try to sound like me and come up with songs that suit what I do, and then just go for it.

Rock guitar has been around for decades now, and there are so many strong traditions, and so much of it is just burned into my fingers. So, nine times out of 10, when I pick up the guitar to jam something, it sounds pretty cliche.

A lot of people ask me why I don't expand and explore other musical areas, but I like the plain three- and four-chord rock-and-roll that I call the the semi-blues.

A lot of songs are derivative of each other. Sometimes you need to take a departure from what you do to something that's slightly different in order to get inspiration.

In the beginning, I wrote OK songs, but they didn't have a unique perspective.

I wanted to play rock and roll when I started playing. Nobody at that time ever thought about songwriting. You sang songs, that's all. You sang other people's songs. That's all there were.

I'm very much a traditionalist, but I think it's important to know about tradition so that you can evolve the music you are deciding to make.

I don't feel that all the great songs have been written. I do feel that where we are now, certainly with rock & roll music, is that so much of it is variations on themes. But I think that it's one's particular creativity and individuality that comes out within that variation on a particular theme that makes a song great.

I study what's happening in music. I want to sound different than everybody else.

I think it's really important to show new styles of song and music. I think that's what people want to see and hear from me.

Dawes is a rock 'n' roll band playing guitars, writing songs, working in a certain tradition. Through our attitude and personality, I hope, you can hear a song and go, 'That's a Dawes song.'

I've always wanted to make records that rock like hell. But also, I've never wanted to compromise that Country place deep inside.

Stylistically, we're trying to push things in different ways, but it always comes out sounding like Tool no matter what we're trying to do.

You know, rock n' roll's an old carcass: it's one big cliche. It's so difficult to do anything that has any sense of freshness or vitality or meaning. But that's what I'm trying to do, to give it new meaning.

It's not enough to play the old songs; that feels like being your own covers band or something. It's a big release to do new stuff.

If you want to do rock and roll, forget about those who've come after '65.

The music I used to make was a lot more rock, so I come from this background of head banging a lot, and it took me a while to figure out how to do it in the context of our music.

I got my style. I got my own way of playing. I'm a musician. I'm self-taught.

I was really into the music of Cream after I finished composing the music for 'BTTB.'

Any time I'm trying to find that groove on a big tempo song, I go back and listen to some Aerosmith records. 'Love in an Elevator,' 'Rag Doll,' all that stuff was really great music. It's something that I still dig and go back and listen to.

Me, who's educated classically, I went toward rock music 'cause it was sort of a natural evolution from where I was playing with my brother. But I was always drawn back into classical music.

You could say, 'Oh, we're gonna write the heaviest album of all time' or 'We're gonna write an album that sounds like 'Iowa.'' Even if we set out to try to do so, it would never compare. We're not those people anymore, we're not that band anymore.