Elvis Costello Quotes

Hopefully I'm bringing to rock n' roll the kind of spontaneity that I love, and always believed rock and roll stands for.

I try to make my music interesting to me first, then hopefully other people will find it interesting, too.

The most important thing is that you honor that musical integrity, whether you make music that sounds like ABBA or you make music that sounds like Void.

I think people hire me for the slightly weird angle that I bring. Part of the trick is keeping it sort of simple; you have to give the impression of not that much music playing when there's really a lot.

The drive to create music that is pure is my highest priority. Sometimes I'll get extremely technical, and other times I'll just kind of go with the gods of music.

In the past, I tried to be more of a typical session guitarist. I wasn't so concerned with impressing anybody.

I wouldn't go so far as to make 'You Don't Own Me' a tango or 'It's My Party' a hip-hop thing. Believe me, those things have been suggested to me. But I thought if I could stay true to the song, the arrangements would work. I'm really enjoying singing them.

I'm only worried about what I'm doing or how I present music. I just try to do things I want to listen to, and I think that's what everybody else is try doing, too.

Seattle isn't known for a particular production sound, so that leaves a lot of great producers in Seattle doing kind of their own thing. And I think, for me, I was probably enough removed from hip-hop that my style was even a little bit weirder than that.

I keep a band of great young people around me, and we're not musically restrained. It's not about 'Let's do it correct' but 'Let's do it right.'

We don't want to box ourselves within any type of genre, you know? Whatever feels good, if it moves us and we like it, we get on it and make it our own. That's what we do.

That's what hip-hop is - it's about meeting the music where you are, and then you add on top of that. It's about coming at it with your full self.

I've lost so many gigs composing commercial or television music because I can't repress my inclination to work against conventions.

With 'Boxer,' we made the kind of music we wanted to make and didn't really worry about what the expectation was.

I don't use conventional voices for my compositions.

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.

I've always liked to be the kind of drummer and musician who likes to go outside of what's expected of me.

I do not like to be a prophet. I like better to paint than to predict what the next painters will do. Though I have a feeling that consideration of order is very much in the air.

You must break all the rules of painting, but you must also convince me you've had a reason to do so.

I should like to paint like an man who has never seen a painting, but this man -myself - lives in a museum.

I think not knowing what to think of your paintings is a good place to be.

You have to be ready, and also you have to discard notions that are fondly held by a lot of musicians, about sequences and notes and about scales and musical systems as a whole. If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.

Paint what you like and die happy

When I am painting I have a general notion as to what I am about. I can control the flow of paint: there is no accident.

I do what I can to convey what I experience before nature and most often, in order to succeed in conveying what I feel, I totally forget the most elementary rules of painting, if they exist that is.