Steven Tyler Quotes

I love to get to that place where I don't know what kind of music I'm doing; I don't know if it's any good. I don't know if it's anything. It's a big question mark. The idea is to have interesting results. That's my bottom line.

I'd listen to a song and say, 'Hang on, I like that piano thing,' so I'd play the guitar like that and get the vibe from it, and it just evolved from the get-go. It was pretty obvious what to do; You don't think about rock n' roll: you just do it.

I don't like to go into the studio with all the songs worked out and planned before hand ... you've got to give the band something to use its imagination on as well. That can make a very ordinary song come alive into something totally different ... the X-factor - so important in rock and roll - which is the feel.

Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it's in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one's own.

You get as much out of rock & roll artistically as you put into it. There's nobody who can teach you. You're on your own and that's what I find so fascinating about it.

I'm not very good at sounding like other people. When you're going through your 20's and trying to get a break and that kind of thing, and you're trying to do something that sounds like film music, your idea of what it would be, it never really worked out for me and it's only really when I learned to trust the fact that I could only really sound like me.

When children start to speak they find their own voice by imitating the sounds around them. It would follow that bands do the same. Bands will find their own voice at some point.

He has found his style, when he cannot do otherwise.

I was always making things. Even though art was what I did every day, it didn't even occur to me that I would be an artist.

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

I get to study and I got to mimic and what I basically did was I stole from every person that I could steal from. I was an imitator. That's what I was. It was years before I could take all of these things that I loved about all of these different artists and put them together and find my voice.

'Hot Fuss' was all based on fantasy. The English influences, the makeup - they were what I imagined rock was. I'm a dreamer, you know? So I dug into that dream and made 'Hot Fuss.' But hearing people call us 'the best British band from America' made me wonder about my family and who I was.

I don't think I really invented anybody. I have drawn on real life.

It takes a long time to find your own voice. Along the way, you imitate all the things that influence you - in my case Johnny Cash, Bowie, John Lydon.

Most people think an artist tries to be original, but originality is the last thing that develops in the artist.

What an artist learns matters little. What he himself discovers has a real worth for him, and gives him the necessary incitement to work.

You need to be different and stand out. You need to have a message. For me, it didn't come easily. The best advice I was ever given, though, is go away and write 100 songs. You need to find the music that's you.

What guides me is to do work that's more avant-garde - things that I think are special. You can easily become a celebrity and get caught up in all that blur. I just want to work and surprise myself.

What I would say to filmmakers, if I may be so bold or so arrogant, is to draw inspiration from other filmmakers, but go to the place in your own gut where everything is nothing. That's a very Zen thing to say, but that place of nothing is where real creativity comes out of.

I think probably with any performer, but maybe with rock music especially, the audience wants to see the singer being real, and exploring, and not doing a rehearsed routine, so I'm just constantly looking for new things to try. I'm really curious out there, and my curiosity has led me into all kinds of bizarre situations.

If you have something you do that's unique, you just end up in situations. Your art can take you to places without you working too hard to force something to happen.

I don't feel that all the great songs have been written. I do feel that where we are now, certainly with rock & roll music, is that so much of it is variations on themes. But I think that it's one's particular creativity and individuality that comes out within that variation on a particular theme that makes a song great.

My identity started developing through the songs I was writing.

Imitation is a caricature. Any imitation. Find out for yourself.

I really just care about making music and how I can make it next.