Chad Gilbert Quotes

You can tell an honest artist from one who's just given all their songs.

An artist should remain true. Otherwise his talent, like his stomach, grows fat and stuffy.

What was exciting to me in talking to Kogonada was I was just very convinced that he was a very real and pure artist. He was so uninterested in the commercial game.

Music's supposed to come from the heart. I felt like that if it ever got mechanical, I was going to back away from it.

To be a true artist you have to play the way you feel - not the way others think you should feel.

I could never sit down and say: I'm going to do an out-and-out comedy, just to prove to people I can. You've just got to do what you do. Just listen to your soul and do your art and do it for the right reasons, and then you can't fail.

Mainly, I don't like it when music is made solely to impress people or in order to please business people; it doesn't sound good to me. If you're making music in order to become famous or loved by the masses... that's not what I'm about. When somebody's making music for the wrong reasons, I hear it right away.

I'd rather sell 10,000 records that represent me than 2 million that don't represent me at all.

If you try to go beyond your interests just for the sake of pretensions or wealth, your art becomes less legitimate.

For me, I really feel like if there's not a real, true connection to the material, I don't need to sing it. I don't need to sing songs just because I like them anymore. I've done that.

We've never written anything to have success with it. We've written songs that we love.

It's not that I imitate him. I use a lot of what I feel. Even now, they refuse for me to stop doing James Brown. If it's something I can feel from the heart and from the soul, I do it.

This goes for our songwriting as well as our success as a band - the minute we stopped chasing what we thought people wanted to hear and started writing things that moved us, that's when people started paying attention.

If you pretend to be somebody that you're not when you write songs - and I did that on some of the early Styx albums - nobody cares about what you have to say.

I really believe in not compromising your art. I feel like I've never compromised my art.

Solo, you don't have compromise. It gets back to what's great when you're a musician.

I feel like there's a lot of pressure on artists to be 100-percent organic all the time.

I would love for my existence as an artist to be completely about my art - not about my social media, or what I do vs what's cool right now, or even whether or not I sound okay in an interview.

Always focus on the music first. That's the big thing. Staying true to making good music and not sacrificing that for anything.

I always talk about if you want to be an artist, you have to be authentic because people can tell bullshit a mile away. There is nothing wrong with creating a character, standing behind that character, and that being an authentic performance piece, because that's a piece of art as well. But if you want to be an artist in any form, you have to know to come with it.

You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it never Rises from the soul, and sways The heart of every single hearer, With deepest power, in simple ways. You’ll sit forever, gluing things together, Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps, Blowing on a miserable fire, Made from your heap of dying ash. Let apes and children praise your art, If their admiration’s to your taste, But you’ll never speak from heart to heart, Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.

If I think of the audience too much, then I'm going to start catering to them...and it turns into entertainment. And I've got time for entertainment; I'm just not at all that interested in doing it myself. I'd rather go for some pretty raw expression.

I think the biggest thing that people fear when it comes to art becoming a business is those authentic, pure aspirations of art being compromised.

The joy is in the creation. So I've never had a target audience, it's always been about being true to the work as it emerges.

The writers who have nothing to say, are the ones you can buy, the others have too high a price.