Adam Jones Quotes

People need to put my music in a perspective where they use other established artists from the past, and almost all the names I see related to my music are great musicians.

It's entertaining to watch somebody break my music down or explain what he thinks I was thinking during the process of making these records. Because... he has no idea.

We should read music in the same way that an educated adult will read a book: in silence, but imagining the sound.

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of 'culture.'

Some people try and tell you what the songs are about and it bores me to death.

I love interpreting other people's music.

Today, with a recording, he can hear the thing enough times until he really gets acquainted with the language, and then he can begin to make an estimate of the intrinsic, aesthetic value of that piece of music.

My confession: I listen to great music very badly.

I think recordings have been a terrific advance because now, when you have a piece of music, particularly something that appears to the listener very complicated, there's really a push to the world to try to figure out what it was that he was hearing.

Musicians are often asked to answer for an entire culture, or for an entire movement. It's a process of commodification. It becomes packaged and summarized in a word like 'emo' or 'grunge'... or 'folk music.' I think that's just language itself, trying to understand the mysteries of the world.

Sometimes people talk about music, whether blogs or magazines, in a strange way where it doesn't seem like they're actually listening to it.

You know I take music seriously, right? So I expect journalists to take being a journalist seriously.

Finding great songs is the hard part of my gig - it's not as hard as songwriting, that's much more daunting - but I love playing other people's music.

I think that most people who write about music just want to fill some paper. They're not really interested in getting to the heart of something. Otherwise, they wouldn't write what they write.

Sometimes you can listen to a song all your life without hearing it.

Before anything else, my favorite thing as a fan of music was to make up my own story as to what it means.

People take music too seriously.

A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it.

Music critics are part of the world, and I am part of the world.

But that's the problem with playing new music sometimes before the record comes out: You have a bunch of yayhoots with opinions.

I studied classical music for a year. Then, I studied jazz for a year at the New School, and then I got kicked out. You had to go to your class, so I don't know if that counts as studying. I didn't study jazz. I was supposed to.

I'm always imagining some sort of story behind the song, even the ones I haven't written. I'm actively engaging in playacting.

I almost chose the career of an ethnomusicologist because I was so fascinated by that music. It gives a different feeling of time.

When I first started all this, it was mostly music fans that came along, Stones fans. But now, I'm being taken seriously. I've got highfalutin' art collectors and everything!

I usually think in terms of music.