Barry Zito Quotes

I can sit and analyze everything and beat myself up and say you don't quite sing as good as you used to, you're writing better songs maybe than you used to, but to me it's just the journey.

I didn't even start playing the piano until I was about 13 or 14. I guess I must have had a little talent or whatever-you-call-it, but I practised regularly, and that's what counts.

I really practiced hard and got to a certain level of technical proficiency. I overcame some of my limitations. I was a hard-working, dedicated bassoonist, but I have to say I'm not a natural musician.

I promise you, if you look at YouTube and see some of my first covers, you will hear that I don't sound good. But I was so obsessed with it and wanted so much to be good at it that I forced myself to figure out what sounds right and what sounds wrong.

I could read music before I could read.

I learned about music by hearing the same song 50 times a day. I had some ability in music. It wasn't in my blood, in my DNA, but if you grow up around something you become good at it.

I will never be good at the oboe. No matter what happens, I will never be good at it because I just don't have that much time on my hands. I don't have the gift of going back to being a child and having my brain develop around this instrument.

I always knew I couldn't sing, but I also knew I had a voice that isn't heard by many, and that I could learn how to stretch it and make songs sound good.

I started writing songs, I guess, when I was about 13 or 14, but I didn't know if they were good enough yet or anything.

I think Jerry Lee is sad. As a musician, he was far more talented than Elvis Presley. Everybody down in Memphis knows that. Elvis became a movie star because he was beautiful. Not that Elvis wasn't talented, but Jerry Lee Lewis was incomprehensibly talented as a musician.

I have to practice to be good at guitar. I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

I'm not the sort of chap who can sit down and write music. When it comes, I'm happy.

When I came to the United States, I appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show as a 13-year-old, and I played a Mendelssohn Concerto, and it sounded like a talented 13-year-old with a lot of promise. But it did not sound like a finished product.

You don't just wake up one morning and decide to become a singer-songwriter.

My big brother Ryan was funny and unfailingly kind. He was one of the most talented musicians you might encounte, and had a prodigious ability to pick up any instrument and play it by ear within the span of a single day.

It seems like if they'd given Bob Dylan a pen and paper in the cradle that he would've come up with a great song. I'd love to write songs like that.

By the grace of God, I'm the only person in my family with any musical ability.

Words have been the most difficult thing for me. Melodies have been the easiest for me; I have more than enough melodies to go around.

At first, I was a pretty horrific singer, and then I got a little better.

I feel like, if you're writing the same songs you were writing when you were 17 in your 30s, something's wrong. As a grown man, you're more confident, and you have less to prove.

I don't really class myself as a musician, I can make music but I'm not the greatest technically. There were other people who were technically better than me in school but I knew how I wanted to sound and all I needed was to work out how to do it.

I can't play guitar well at all, so I had to learn that.

I didn't pretend that I was good at writing music, so I wrote terrible music, intentionally. As time went on, the terrible subsided, and I started getting good.

I would sing around the house, and I would always play on things just because instruments were always there, but I didn't show any genius as a child. I wasn't a prodigy or anything like that.

There's no musician who just wakes up one day and decides, 'This is what I want to do.' It takes some development.