Greil Marcus Quotes

The thing that influenced me most was the way Tommy played his trombone. It was my idea to make my voice work in the same way as a trombone or violin-not sounding like them, but "playing" the voice like those instrumentalists.

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

Music is the thousandth of a millisecond between one note and another; how you get from one to the other-that's where the music is.

I have often heard the statement made by foreign singers, as a demonstrated fact, that the German artists are artists in feeling indeed, and serious in their devotion, but that their singing is crude.

Being in music forever, I have good pitch, so I know when I'm singing in or out of tune. But the key to really good singing is just relaxing and thinking about what the song is.

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

You see the genius that Whitney Houston has as an interpreter of material, and you realize why genius can be applied to only a few interpretive performers. She finds meaning and depth and soulfulness in a song that often the writer and composer never really knew was there.

It's not enough to hit the notes. There is no point in the singers just standing there and sounding wonderful if they're not connecting with the characters they are portraying.

To sing is to bring to life; impossible if the words are mediocre, however good the music.

There's nothing but spirit in music. That's all it is. Yeah, there's a lot of intellectual elements to it, but no matter how you approach it, it's all spirit.

There's so much you can do with laying words on a bed of music. You can completely change their meaning with the type of music or the way they're sung.

As a singer, you have to bring the soul to the song.

I think of myself as an interpretative singer and a songwriter.

I don't think the singers take it as seriously as we used to. The words, the meaning, the phrasing, the feeling of the song. They see the words, they know the tune and they just sing it.

Every song is true and has its unique story behind it.

I love every song that I did with Pancham and Gulzarbhai.

I like to let the songs speak so that they can go through some kind of rebirth as you play them.

Erik Satie does not say the opposite of Debussy; he says the same thing only the other way round.

I write poems for myself and I write poetry that gets torn apart and becomes songs. I have a lot of respect for words, the power of words.

Music has fed me a lot of ideas... The film BLUE VELVET came out of Bobby Vinton's version of the song BLUE VELVET.

I'm just a man, not a hero. just a boy, who wants to sing this song.

Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs and every song recalls a thousand sorrows and so they are infinite in number and all the same.

To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.

Music is the perfect type of art.

If you're a song writer, it's a bit different because you are expressing your own words, feelings, perspective. As an actor, you are doing your best to interpret and express the root of the character's perspective which have been established by the writer. There are parallels of performing. Tapping into your own emotional piggy bank. The biggest commonality is if you are successful in either industry, you get free snacks all the time.