Bruce Hornsby Quotes

Playing a song changes a song. Every night a song becomes something else on stage.

Playing live is about going for it .. it's about bringing it ... you should see a bunch of people trying out stuff, actually performing, instead of learning the record and recreating it note for note. I can't play the show the same way every night .. I really need to be in a creative environment, every night or I'll go nuts ... my manager accuses me of singing just long enough to get me to my next guitar solo - which is true.

That person who's going to a concert for a nostalgic reason, we're not really going to placate. We still play three or four hits every night. Now, we don't play them like the record. We try to find new ways to do it.

The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.

Every song asks to be sung in a different way.

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

In Mali, you hear music everywhere. What is fantastic in Mali is the music tradition is handed down from father to son orally. It is not written. You learn from your father and add something, because you are living now and telling a story to others. This results in many different interpretations of the same song.

To get up on stage with a band is fantastic. To play songs to an audience is mindblowing.

I consider myself a lyricist first and foremost, but if you get something else out of what I do, that's fine too. I'm not sitting back here telling people how they have to take my stuff. We just want to play music, and hope that people like it.

I try to find out what there is in the character that in a way, you can't put into words. If I could put it into words, then it wouldn't be a performance. And if I do put it into words, as I play it, I start to get boxed in by those words.

Folk songs are evasive-the truth about life, and life is more or less a lie, but then again that's exactly the way we want it to be. We wouldn't be comfortable with it any other way. A folk song has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff. A folk song might vary in meaning and it might not appear the same from one moment to the next. It depends on who's playing and who's listening.

The good thing about playing with other musicians is that it's much easier to make the translation to playing live. It's much more difficult if you're trying to take something you've overdubbed alone on stage. But again, there are some benefits.

I try all night to play a pretty note.

The exercise in theater is night after night you are doing the same play, but you have another opportunity to explore. It changes nightly even because of the audience and your day going into the evening of the performance. With film it's much more controlled.

There is no piece of music that could relate to anything else but itself and its world. It is truly an independent. The one thing coplanar with music is the compositional aspect, the fact that you are composing something. Architecture is essentially a score, and what happens with it depends on the people who play it, enjoy it, use it, or hate it.

It feels that way when I'm doing a play, absolutely. On film and television, it's more complicated than that I think, and when you start to add the business into the mix, and the industry into the mix, it doesn't maintain it's purity. That's something that's inevitable and unavoidable, but that's why I try to do plays as much as I possibly can.

Look, when people came after me for doing 'Indecent Proposal' or 'Disclosure,' I thought, 'Ridiculous.' These people are trying to limit me as an actor. Are they saying I can't play these roles? Well, I've proved I can.

I would say I am more concerned with the plays I'm going to do than the movies. I'm more comfortable in a play. In film, there's always a certain sense of control, of holding back. The stage is different ; there's more to act. There are more demands put on you, more experiences to go through.

I can't stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession, let alone two years or ten years.

I just like writing lyrics. I find a little satisfaction in performing live, making records. But primarily, I just try to write every day.

Performance and music are inexorably tied together. And hell, I'll watch Brittany's Toxic music video all day. But there's a difference between that and listening to Leo Kottke play guitar. One is entertainment. The other is Music.

Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.

I've never really been nervous about any concerts. I enjoy it so much. All that matters is getting the songs played well, trying to get them to sound as close to the record live, which isn't easy, because my music is quite complicated to play.

There's nothing like an opening night or like the curtain going up and having a full house, but also having weeks and weeks to work with your director and cast members and try to crack the play. It's great.

Words are the instruments you play to the song of your ideas, you're just playing covers.