John Burnside Quotes

Any talk of 'craft' makes me laugh. My music looks outward; it does not gaze upon itself in admiration. Artisanal is for cheesemakers. I don't know anything about music theory. Every time I approach my guitar, it's like the first time. There's no craft in that.

Songs seem to always spring from improvisation.

Improvising is writing, too - there was no music and now there's music. So that's composition. And any time you take any sort of a performance liberty, you're making a compositional choice. I don't know a serious performer who hasn't made compositional decisions, who hasn't engaged in the art of composition.

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

I think you have to keep a childlike quality to play music or make a record.

What I always try to do is to respond to the song; I've always rebelled against theory.

There's a wonderful tradition of jazz people getting on stage and jamming and finding some feeling for music with audiences who may be fresh. For others, it might be just like a comfortable shirt they've been wearing.

When I start playing I'm just a rollercoaster of sound. I don't know what's coming next, I never do, and I sit and sign and talk to the people afterwards.

I didn't really know what I was doing when I started. I just started writing songs. After two songs I just continued to explore it.

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 look at my clarinet sometimes and I think, I wonder what's going to come out of there tonight? You never know.

In the past, we never really had that kind of spontaneity on record. When you start touring, you play songs in a certain way and then I start to feel like it's tough to really get lost in my playing.

The apparatus has to serve our improbability and improvisation. Being good and playing the songs is not enough.

I don't always have to be on what is the newest in music is. I'm slowly educating myself in music. For me, I feel more free in not knowing everything in what I'm doing. You can start making up too many rules for yourself. It should just be love and fun and feeling good.

When you're playing the same dirty dozen night after night, the moments that keep it fresh are those when you just let go and trust everyone.

Improvising is wonderful. But, the thing is that you cannot improvise unless you know exactly what you're doing. That's a kind of paradoxical thing about improvising.

Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn't have anything to do with me, but it's just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.

Classical stuff takes a lot of rehearsal time and preparation, but with stuff that involves improvisation, you can over-rehearse it and it gets stale. You don't want it to be too comfortable. In fact, a good sound check, a good rehearsal usually means a bad performance.

We really never know what we're gonna play when we get on stage.

Learning how to improvise really awakened my interest in music.

I learned that music should be fun and should be a way to express yourself - that there aren't really any rules.

I love to improvise when it's appropriate and encouraged by a producer.

Improvisation is a compositional method.

What I want to happen is to be really creative, and to play something new in the improvisations, every time.

It is the most delightful thing that ever happens to me, when I hear something coming out of my guitar and out of my mouth that wasn't there before.