I wanted to write songs which I think is a different thing. I wanted to write music that is informed by folk music. The chord progressions are obvious references.
You know there's this really strange mystique about Simon and Garfunkel, when they use the amazing mandolin and all the percussive stuff. It sometimes sounds very global.
Hymn tunes are the nearest we've got to English folk music.
And it's very strange, but I think there is something very common - not only in Celtic music - but there is a factor or element in Celtic music that is similar in music that we find in Japan, the United States, Europe, and even China and other Asian countries.
I write alternative, folkie pop. It's very acoustic.
It's just so obscure to take a folk song in a different language and be a pretty well-respected English-speaking rock band and totally take a song and twist it around and have fun with it.
I like a lot of soul, but I also put a lot of folk into what I do.
I absorbed the vinyl of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Jack Elliott, to Michael McClure and then into the Beat poets, Allen Ginsberg. At campus, we were absorbing that stuff. We looked to America.
Folk music usually has an emphasis on the lyrics and melody. And those lyrics are usually relevant in some way. And it's populist in scope, which is also true of Bad Religion. So it's more meant to draw some parallels between the two. And I think even my voice and my delivery can be thought of as a little bit folky.
I'm actually doing what I like doing, which is mixing opera music and classical music with soul and folk. And I was writing and talking about what I've actually experienced, and I don't think that's very common.
That's really always been the music that I've been in love with, always the music that I've written growing up. Even through Pentatonix, folk music has been really my heart and soul.
The first music I was ever exposed to was Irish folk music, like the Clancy Brothers. My father plays that and Christmas songs.
Nothing great or enduring, especially in music, has ever sprung full-fledged and unprecedented from the brain of any master; the best he gives to the world he gathers from the hearts of the people, and runs it through the alembic of his genius.
Mumford and Sons and Adele are both incredible artists and are great for popular music. There's a lot of club music with heavy beats, so to have that Mumford record and hear banjos being used is so cool.
The music I love listening to is more of the Jack Johnson, Ben Harper, Dido, Jewel, Nora Jones, Joss Stone, a bit more of that organic live-instrumentation feel.
I started out in the folk music world only because of the way my songs were written and performed, with just an acoustic guitar, but I always related to the rock n' roll lifestyle.
Me and Kurt Cobain were both listening to a bunch of Lead Belly and diggin' it. We thought, 'Let's do an EP of all Lead Belly songs.' We did a couple, and both of us were like, 'Nah, this is a bad concept.' We set it aside.
I've been hearing fiddle music since I was in the womb, I'm sure.
The thing that I took away as an early fan from Bob Dylan was the storytelling aspects. He can tell some wicked stories.
I come from a jazzy, acoustic, folky background. Everything has to work with melodies; the words have to have meaning.
People don't listen to one radio station. On iTunes you can mix different worlds and bring country and pop and folk and live music together with a mass audience. I could have sung 'Easy' in a country way but I just sang it how I sing. I think it's a really nice blend.
Influenced by Pete Seeger and the Weavers, McLean proudly wore the mantle of troubadour in the early 1970s, when 'American Pie' topped the Billboard charts, and has never shed the cape.
If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well, that's still well and good. Folk songs had taught me that.
My finger picking is sort of a cross between Pete Seeger, Earl Scruggs, and total incompetence.
I have always loved composers who have been connected with folk traditions of popular music.
