Robert Plant Quotes

We play melodic music, we play songs, we play all kinds of things and when you improvise you don't just shut out different languages, you use all the languages that you have.

The magic of playing has to do with how much everyone wants it to succeed. If you have five players in a situation where the music is being improvised and one is determined it is not going to succeed, it won't succeed even if one of the musicians takes control.

Andy Timmons is someone I've jammed with many times over the years, and we always have a great chemistry when playing together.

I didn't think of myself as a lead player, especially when we did live shows, because me and Keith used to switch around all the time. He'd take a lead, I'd play rhythm. Sometimes even within one song. It wasn't strict and regimented.

Sometimes I like to make music together with a singer or with singers.

It's hard to find five musicians who know what the other is going to do before they do it. And that's what we had in GN'R.

We would play, then they would play a set, then we would jam on the last song.

I'm playing with Bonnie Raitt. I don't have to sing it. I just have to play it. That's cool.

Just because you put super great musicians together, it doesn't mean you're going to have that chemistry as a band.

Even though I have often recorded alone, I still feel the best music is made by musicians playing off each other.

I'm naturally going to react to that and he'll bring out elements in my musical character that were lying dormant, because I'm relating what he's playing.

We're looking to help our guitar buddies do their thing while at the same time we try to create something we might enjoy listening to ourselves. If anything we are trying to develop a vocabulary so we can converse more fluidly.

I think my music has always been a mixture, depending on whom I'm working with - what band, what musicians, what producer.

Most musicians count at the beginning, and never count and talk to their musicians after that. They only talk to them at the end of the song. But I would count with them and talk.

For me, the music dictates the melody. Give me a riff to sing over, you know?

You have to have some connection, empathy, or chemistry with the person you're playing and playing with.

In 'Heart of Gold' at one point, there were 23 players on the stage with him. And part of what's magic about Neil is the way he interacts with the other musicians.

I love singing my own stuff, but I also love being a guitar player. Doing both keeps things interesting.

I always communicate musically. I want my band not only to learn the form and feel of the song by ear, like I do, but also have the freedom to contribute.

In 'Boondien' I worked with a band where everyone had their own instrument to play.

You have a great result if the orchestra trusts the conductor, and the conductor trusts the orchestra.

I see myself as a composer who plays music and likes to play with other people, and not just as a solo artist.

I think the other thing that's important is getting to a place, which very, very rarely happens with improvising groups, where somebody can decide not to play for a while. You watch any group of musicians improvising together and they nearly all play nearly all the time. In fact I often say that the biggest difference between classical music and everything else is that classical musicians sometimes shut up because they're told to, because the score tells them to. Whereas any music that's sort of based on folk or jazz, everybody plays all the time.

We were always complete opposite characters - that's what made N-Dubz - and we publically said that, and we said it in our songs.

I think, at the end of the day, that was really what the reward for production is for me, is being allowed to be a part of somebody else's musical vision for a while. Like Gwar. I got to do a Gwar record, right? That was great.