John Gourley Quotes

I would rather fall flat on my face than try to just make a quick dollar by making music that fits into the radio format right now. It does nothing for me.

I'm just not interested in selling out to get on the charts and make people happy.

Obviously, I would like to play to bigger audiences and have a bit more success, but not if I have to commercialize.

When no one's buying your records, it's easy to justify selling a song. But once you start selling records, you can't really justify having two songs in Cadillac commercials. It looks greedy. And it is greedy. This whole music thing should be about music.

I didn't want to be told what to do. I don't want to water down my music to fit into their formats. I know what rock and roll is to me, but everything's turning into one big commercial.

And frankly, when I made that record, hit songs were not what I was trying to achieve.

To say that an artist sells out means that an artist is making a conscious choice to compromise his music, to to weaken his music for the sake of commercial gain.

There's no real excuse for being successful enough as an actor to do what you want and then selling out. You do it pure. You don't try to adapt it, make it commercial.

A lot of these artists are out here don't stay true to why they started doing this in the first place.

I know how to make a record that commercial radio or Triple J will smash now... It's kind of hard to stay true and write what you would write if you didn't have that in your head. Because I know I can get way more airplay and get this much bigger... and that's what I'm trying to avoid doing. Trying to avoid the poisons of success.

Of course, you're not making records in a vacuum. I'm not making them for myself. It would be nice if I could get more people to hear them. But if I have to sell my soul to the devil to do it, I won't.

I want to make music that I like; not something that I have to make because I think it's going to sell.

In the music industry, we value large success. I realized that while I would like that, that it's not what my writing is about. And if I start making it about that, it becomes impure.

I'm not saying I wasn't flawed or amateurish. But you can never say I did anything to appease the music business.

Any band that is out there chasing it is doing more destruction to music then someone who is out there playing what they truly feel.

If any of our songs ever did make it on the top ten, I'd disband the group immediately.

I don't want to sell my soul to Hollywood - to just make run-of-the-mill stuff.

I am very aware now that music is a business, but there is also a way to go about making music that is true to yourself as opposed to doing, you know, just going through the motions and making things that would just be commercially successful.

The artists in country music who stopped having hits are the ones who were led into something that wasn't them.

I can't constantly be trying to write the unwritten song, the song that the 15-year-old girl needs. I need to write the song that I need.

I don't want to get too involved in marketing budgets, online promotions and download set-ups because it would be a bit like Gertrude Stein mapping out a TV campaign. I want to sing. I want visibility. I am essentially Al Martino, not Seymour Stein.

I've heard some people say that I'm selling out, but I'm not. If I hadn't done 'Black Radio', and just kept on doing just piano trio stuff, I wouldn't be honest with myself; I'd be doing it to please other people. That would be selling out.

The music industry can make you feel like a prostitute.

Writing a song to be a single is hard, and I don't like to focus on that because you can get caught up in making something just terrible, which is really easy to do if you're focused on making it a single. It's more fun when you focus on what excites you musically.

My music is going to be true. I'm not out to sell records. I'm experiencing something, and it's what I feel.