Joe Bonamassa Quotes

I think the purpose of a piece of music is significant when it actually lives in somebody else. A composer puts down a code, and a performer can activate the code in somebody else. Once it lives in somebody else, it can live in others as well.

When an audience comes to one of my concerts, I hope they'll see themselves, somewhere, in one of the songs.

In the '50s, listening to Elvis and others on the radio in Bombay - it didn't feel alien. Noises made by a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, seemed relevant to a middle-class kid growing up on the other side of the world. That has always fascinated me.

Composers, like authors, have a lot in common. Our main goal is to connect with the listener emotionally.

It's been a continuity right from the beginning - that longing to weave together perceptions, to affirm the richness of us as human beings both as performers and audience members.

Wanting to be understood by an audience that didn't know Russian, I tried to paint musical pictures by emphasizing the phrasing, using voice color more boldly, and varying the shade and nuance.

Feelings are universal, and if an actor's doing his job, I think he's making people sit there, and if it's in a movie or a theatre, going 'Hmm, yeah, I know that... I know that.'

I like connecting with people, and that's what good art is: a point of connection. There's nothing better, on stage or on film.

I question what emotion Manilow touches. People are entertained by him. But are they emotionally moved? I don't believe anything that Barry Manilow sings.

In song the same rule applies as in dramatic verse: the meaning must yield itself, or yield itself sufficiently to arouse the attention and interest, in real time.

In chamber music, the audience can hear each instrument and understand (and feel) what the composer and the musicians have in mind as they play.

How does my music connect to an audience? That is just a complete mystery to me.

You always feel like rock critics are frustrated musicians. I envy musicians their ability to live their art and share it with an audience, in the moment.

I've had a very, very interesting view of the planet over the last 30 years, touring as excessively as I have. And music is the most evocative, transformative, connective force in humanity, man.

Art is essentially communication. It doesn't exist in a vacuum. That's why people make art, so other people can relate to it.

Ultimately, what we do as musicians, I think of us as a type of emotional engineer. We essential take these sound waves, this sound, and we organize it into emotion, and that's how we connect with our audiences.

I think wherever you go, when people hear good music, they will react to it.

I think that theater is a unique way to communicate with people as they gather together with other people they may not even know. It creates a sense of shared community for the time of the performance that hopefully carries over into other aspects of the audience's life because they have shared this experience together.

Music is the greatest communication in the world. Even if people don't understand the language that you're singing in, they still know good music when they hear it.

The stuff that I dig, it's usually got a soulful component to it. A singer that I really like. I might not understand the language that they're singing in, but I'm really communing with this person.

It's amazing when you're playing to a crowd who barely understands English but they're singing parts of your song back to you.

The great musicians are those who can reach people, who can make people feel something.

Intimacy comes from being yourself on the stage and making the audience feel, without trying, that you're sittin' down there with 'em, playing, and that can happen in a big hall, if you have a good audience that want to listen.

The thing I love about music is that if a singer is good, let's say, you are instantly transported to that emotion. Acting is a more drawn-out process.

I couldn't live without music. I experienced things through music in different countries where you cannot speak the same language, but the music and the dance relates everything.