Ben Harper Quotes

There are a lot of singers who cannot sing to save their lives. We have to accept it, but thank God there is such a thing as live shows. It's only when people are faced with live shows that the world gets to know how good or how bad they are.

For me, the best thing I can do is play live. The best way for me to put over what I'm trying to do is to play live. Whether it's an acoustic show, electric or whatever... if I shine at all, that's where it all really happens - it just took me a while to rediscover that.

A lot of times I play my music at shows based on the views and the streams.

I was very lucky to have had the opportunity to tour with the Beastie Boys and watched almost every set they played on all those dates. Why not? You do your set and then you get to see the Beasties play? Best deal in town.

And the general opinion is we are much better on stage than in the studio.

The climate suits me, and London has the greatest serious music that you can hear any day of the week in the world - you think it's going to be Vienna or Paris or somewhere, but if you go to Vienna or Paris and say, 'Let's hear some good music', there isn't any.

What people really should be able to be confident in is that the standards of music- making that classically trained musicians present is elite, it is the best and all of us as artists should be committed to that.

You should play with real musicians; the best music comes from real people interacting with each other.

Anything you can do to get more people to come to your live shows is good, because that's where you can really do what you do. Everyone's on the same page, and you don't have to win strangers over as much.

It's important for me to put out things that I think are good - I want to be a fan of my own stuff. I also want my live shows to be really awesome, and dance is such an important element for me and my performances.

I've been to two stadium gigs in my life. One was James Brown and the other was Pink Floyd. They both sounded the same. I couldn't tell the difference between James Brown and Pink Floyd. I've never liked stadiums.

'YouKu' means what's best and what's cool in Chinese. So, the whole product philosophy really revolves around how to help users, from a massive video database, finds what's best and what's cool.

All I have is my performance, I try to feed in the best of everything that I could possibly do into those 90 minutes and to make a live entertainment show out of it.

We played it as long as we could play it on that CD and I think it might be 50 minutes, maybe. What you have to do is play a couple of songs and then get off the stage because everything that trails it sounds stupid.

The best thing about being on the road in general is just playing every single night in front of people that are genuinely fans of your music.

I think we've always been better live.

At Spotify, we really want you to democratically win as a musician. We want you to win because your music is the best music.

People have said I played some pretty amazing gigs in the seventies, but in all honesty, I probably played one good show in three.

Most of the people I hang out with who sing love it, and they just want to do it until they die. I still look forward to the performances. And believe it or not, they're all kind of different. Even though you sing the same songs, and maybe you go to the same venues, it just feels completely different every time you go on stage.

The DJs with a lot of hype are not necessarily the best DJs at creating a vibe.

If you like it live, you know that you're probably going to like the record, usually.

So many bands play to tracks - what's the point in coming to see them live if they're playing to a CD?

I think that my performances with Led Zeppelin got better with each performance and I think that our performances as Led Zeppelin Experience have also gotten better with each show.

I sign up whatever live shows I get simply because every gig is a chance to reach out directly to the audience. When it comes to gigs, I try mixing personal picks with what the audience demands.

People don't buy music anymore; they're stealing it. But you can't steal a live show. There's no way to reproduce a real live show. So I think that when you put a great bill together, that people will come out for it.