Leo Kottke Quotes

I have no shame in making music that maybe, if you listen to it long enough, you'll realize you've heard this or that part of it before. I'm still very excited by an amazingly written song, so that's really the thing that I work on when I make records with people.

One musician listens to another musician, and you get inspired and then you do your thing, but it's yours.

I was using them as teachers for technique but I was never trying to be a folk.

I'll sit around and play my guitar; that's how I write tunes.

I take stuff because I'm inspired by it.

People ask what was the first piece of music I wrote. There was no first piece.

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

I wrote my first song at 6. I spent every day with the guitar, and I just made up songs.

I wouldn't just have other people write songs and me go out and sing it. I would sit down with a guitar and write 11 or 12 good songs for an album and that is gonna take a long time.

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

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.

All we do as songwriters is rewrite the songs that have impressed us till we find our own voice. It's part of learning the craft.

I think its so cool that you can pick up the guitar and create something that didn't exist 5 minutes ago. You can write something that no ones ever heard before. You have music at your fingertips.

You cannot possibly invent painting all by yourself.

So, once I get writing I really try and put five to eight hours a day in my room with a guitar to really try and come up with stuff that feels interesting enough to me to keep it.

One of my biggest thrills for me still is sitting down with a guitar or a piano and just out of nowhere trying to make a song happen.

I think it's being innovative and very creative to stay away from flat-out sampling somebody else's record. To me, that doesn't show too much of your creative side unless you take a little piece and add it, almost like spice on a chicken.

If you look at any creative person's work, you can see bits and pieces of their influences. That's what an artist does.

When I go into a room to write, it's like I'm not trying to say, 'I need to write a song that sounds like Eric Church or Jason Aldean.' I just try to get the best song that's in the room that day. Whatever style or sound that may be, I'm not afraid to attack it at that angle.

To be able to take music and do something as profoundly original as what we did with the Allman Brothers, you've got to put some time into it.

I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel. I'm just writing songs that I like, and that's where I've always come from.

When you start a rock n' roll band, you've gotta fake it till you make it. You begin by doin' what you love- and what you love is usually what some other people have already done. It just depends on how much of a fool you make of yourself along the way to finding your own sound, assuming you find it.

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.

I'm drawing from two generations back how to think about music, how to think about why you travel to make music, what the possible pitfalls of that are for the way your life is structured. The good and bad of all of it get into the mix of what's created, what you're creating.

My interest in making music has been to create something that does not exist that I would like to listen to. I wanted to hear music that had not yet happened, by putting together things that suggested a new thing which did not yet exist.