Charlie Hunter Quotes

A band is like a marriage - you don't know why it works, but when it does, everything feels right.

Band members have a special bond. A great band is more than just some people working together. It's like a highly specialized army unit, or a winning sports team. A unique combination of elements that becomes stronger together than apart.

Sometimes one of us will have a riff or a bass line from home but it really gels when we come together. We really have a strong special chemistry that we take advantage of when we get together.

Bands are about these little relationships that make everything tick, and when you create new music you're testing those relationships.

The Eagles are four very alpha personalities. We've all done solo work, and we've all played with very good musicians, but when the four of us get together, it becomes something that's much bigger than any one of us.

When you play with another piano player, it's just second nature to play the parts that need to be played.

Singing duets is instinctive, intuitive.

Being a three piece, maybe it's easier. You only have two other guys, musically, and everything else to contend with and work with.

My band and I are even closer. They've grown with me over four years, so we're closer and closer and closer.

In a band that works out well, everybody has a certain role to fulfill.

When I joined Nirvana, I was the fifth or sixth drummer - I don't know if they'd ever had a drummer they were totally happy with. And they were strangers. There was never much of a deeper connection outside of the music.

It's hard to say when the life of a band starts and stops... but playing music together is an act of trust. When that's broken, it's impossible to continue.

Lately Fish and I have been hooking up more, which is a good thing because it's just been a struggle for me as a bass player to play with someone who's so creative on the drums, and lately it's been really good, especially during sound checks.

I just think that with music, it's kind of like life, and so the people you work with, you generally develop a relationship. You don't have to try to explain things. You just know. It's like you're in the band together and striving for the same goal.

The wonderful thing about rock music is even if you hate the other person, sometimes you need him more, you know. In other words if he's the guy that made that sound, he's the guy that made that sound, and without that guy making that sound, you don't have a band, you know.

When Phil and I hit that one spot where I call it 'The Everly Brothers,' I don't know where it is. 'Cause it's not me and it's not him. It's the two of us together. I sing the lead, and so I can drift off. Then we'll come back in together and the whole thing happens again. It amazes me sometimes.

Marty and I are playing with the same intensity. That's the beautiful thing, man, we're actually better now than ever, probably more intense now than ever, tighter now than ever.

It's easy to put on a Deep Purple record and say, 'That sounds great.' But why? Part of it is individual practice, but by playing together, a talent of meshing happens.

Working with the Kinks, there always seemed to be some kind of automatic process at work. Ray and I had this telepathy happening for a long time, where one of us always knew what the other could do with something.

I've been in very many situations where I've not liked the other members of the band or they have not liked me. I grew up presuming that's the way music was made. It doesn't need to be that way. It's taken me years years to find that out.

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

Being in a band is a really magical thing because you've got a family and you operate as this one entity. It's very democratic; everyone is involved in the output. But within that, there can be a lot of disagreements and strife.

Singing with Aaron Neville, he pulled stuff out of my voice I never could have gotten, because if he's providing XYZ, I have to put in ABC, and usually I don't have to put in ABC.

I've played in bands with A-team players around. But unless they can play together, it doesn't do any good. And you can take guys who may not stand on their own up against a bunch of individuals they might be compared to, but you put 'em together, man, and they are unique unto themselves in a way that no one else can touch.

It wasn't a class system where I was the better guy and he was the second-rate guy. That was his role and my role was to play the solos. But he took great pride in his technique as a rhythm guitarist.