Utah Phillips Quotes

I really get that some people like the roots-rock, storytelling thing that I was doing, and I'm proud of that.

I came late to the genre of folk music.

I am fascinated by the places that music comes from, like fife-and-drum blues from southern Mississippi or Cajun music out of Lafayette, Louisiana, shape-note singing, old harp singing from the mountains - I love that stuff. It's like the beginning of rock and roll: something comes down from the hills, and something comes up from the delta.

I love all sorts of music. I'm really into Damian Rice and Amos Lee.

When you travel on a bus with guys who love all kinds of music, you get exposed to some great stuff, man.

My dad is a huge folk music fan, so growing up, there were always records playing in my house. Carole King, James Taylor, Simon and Garfunkel, the Beatles - I grew up with this music, and I was aware of how special this music was to a lot of people.

I looooove Jason Isbell.

I guess my favorite artists are The White Stripes or Tom Waits. The more theatrical the music is, the more I get into it. I also like the quieter folk music, that kind of old-school rockabilly or country. I'm not really picky when it comes to music, as long as it's honest.

My thought was I should try to stick with names that people may recognize like Robert Johnson, Son House, and Hoagy Carmichael, so if somebody cared to research, they would find a wealth of material.

I always give a lot of credit to Ronnie Dunn for making me fall in love with country music.

Country music has always been about as close to R&B as you can possibly get. We're storytellers.

I never get tired of exploring Americana or country music, and I always have a little bit of a crooner in me that never seems to go away.

To be honest, I'm really into folk music, and I love Big Phony. I like Priscilla Ahn, and yeah, I really support Asian-American artists.

The native music of North America, the original-roots music of this country, is also the underworld music of this country.

People like Beck and Shawn Colvin are some of the people I listen to lately.

The singer-songwriter has always played music that was stylistically rooted in the '30s and the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. But the fact of the matter is that none of us remember the Depression firsthand.

I got hooked into folk music by accident, because that's what white college kids liked when I was a child.

I like country music. I'm not going to lie. I'm from the South, and I grew up on it. My dad was a country singer-songwriter, so it's in my blood, and I love it.

First I was a European-style player, then I was a downtown 'noise guy,' and now some people call me an Americana guy.

Probably having fallen in love with music and movies at a young age and then first learning about writing by kind of following the path of writers like Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs and being a rock journalist.

I don't have very sophisticated taste in music. I listen to a lot of folk music. I like reggae.

I love Lady Antebellum and Miranda Lambert - they write from the heart. But it's hard to find a country music lover in L.A. None of my friends really listen to it, and they hate getting in the car with me because I just blast Taylor Swift.

Then about 12 years ago it dawned on me that folk music - the music of Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs, early Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger - could be as heavy as anything that comes through a Marshall stack. The combination of three chords and the right lyrical couplet can be as heavy as anything in the Metallica catalogue.

Ian and Sylvia, who, when you got right down to it, were essentially country and western singers. I just recorded his Four Strong Winds. It's a wonderful song.

When I was in Boston, I was doing a lot of Americana stuff - I fell in love with Ray LaMontagne, Patty Griffin, and Neil Young.