Steve Young Quotes

I let the song come to me. Then that thing comes to you, and you just know what that thing is. Music isn't like a 9-to-5 job. You never know. It's just the most unpredictable thing.

My first instrument was my voice. I was always singing and writing melodies when I was a little kid. I just sort of taught myself whatever was around. If there were instruments around, I'd play them. I always liked the idea of not being shown but coming up with my own energetic connection to the instrument.

I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I'm playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.

I never set out to write a certain kind of song, I just play my guitar and see if I catch something.

Ultimately, at the end of it, it's just trying to get into that space where you feel like you're hitting the right thing and you're making music. And it feels intuitive rather than being counterintuitive.

Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there's no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.

I picked up the guitar very late, in a very pagan way - I didn't know how to play, but I knew I had to. I drew and I had a diary, but it wasn't enough; I needed to express more. As soon as I learned two notes, I started to tell a story, which is why, I guess, my music resembles blues or folk.

And, so, when I picked up the guitar, suddenly, just playing a couple of notes really, really spoke to me. It was almost like I should have been doing it prior to that. You know, it was something that just felt really natural.

I couldn't find a way to write music with numbers and rules and schedules. So I tried to forget the academic idea of music and started to see if it was possible to do creative work, taking in all the influences I wanted to keep.

I'll never forget when I heard Steve Morse and the Dixie Dregs for the first time. I was just blown away, and it changed my whole approach to guitar.

I must have been five or six when I realised all the stuff I was writing made sense with what I was playing on the piano.

One of my mottos for 'Currents' was 'Give the song what it deserves.' How would this song flourish? If the song could tell me what it wants, what can I give it? I tried not to dictate it with any sensible or logical decisions.

I listen to somebody like Shawn Lane, and unfortunately he is no longer with us, but I hear him playing and I am like, 'That is just absolutely ridiculous.'

Songs seem to always spring from improvisation.

I do spend time trying to find good melodies, and I try to remember them when I do discover them. But also it's mostly intuitive; I noodle around with the line until it sounds and feels right.

All of my solos were improvised initially - I would go in and get my bearings and see what I came up with.

Writing music - particularly music without lyrics - calls almost exclusively on the subconscious.

I'm definitely a singer, but I play. I write music too, but it's all coming from the same source. I have never learned an instrument any other way than by myself.

If it weren’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college.

And I remember that about three years before that, her first record had come out. And I just remember really liking this one song off it called "In My Bed" and being a little bit enamored. This, you know, this young kind of Jewish girl from North London, you know, I have the same thing - from a Jewish family from North London - with this incredible voice.

I started going to a piano teacher at 5 years old, but pretty soon I started picking things out on my own and stopped taking music lessons. I never could read music very well, but I've still been doing it.

If, while at the piano, you attempt to form little melodies, that is very well; but if they come into your mind of themselves, when you are not practising, you may be still more pleased; for the internal organ of music is then roused in you. The fingers must do what the head desires; not the contrary.

The education system is where young skulls full of mush are programmed and propagandized into the system. They are highly valuable. That's why they're subsidized. You know, universities are approaching the same circumstance we have in health care. What it costs is not related at all to market forces. Meaning what it costs is not related to what people can afford. You get right down to it, how many Americans, how many families can afford 20,000, 30,000, $50,000 a year or semester to send their kids off to college? It has to be subsidized.

Many years ago, in the late '70s, I toured colleges along the East Coast and I presented a kind of show where I got a lot of books and poetry and pieces of [William] Shakespeare and other writers that I admire, read it to the class and then afterward we would talk and I would answer questions. It was really a way of expressing and finding out about where I was at that particular time, so it was very therapeutic for me.

I want to die at a hundred years old with an American flag on my back and the star of Texas on my helmet, after screaming down an Alpine descent on a bicycle at 75 miles per hour.