Golden Age of Music Quotes

I respected Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra. Those were my heroes, and they were 10 years older than I was.

Music has never been at a better time then it is right now, we're really lucky to be a part of this wonderful thing called music.

You know, my era of DJing was the 90s. I think that was one of the best eras of music, period. From dancehall to hip hop to rock to pop to R&B to everything. I just like that era of music, so I just listen to a lot of 90s overall but definitely 90s hip hop.

That's what we grew up with - the good songs, the good lyrics, the good big-band stuff. I miss that era.

My view is that the great songwriting happened between 1920 and 1960. We're all, in our different ways, descended from the great songwriters of that era.

I'm a '90s kid, so I went into the entire album process wanting to incorporate little touches of that sound from hip-hop and R&B. Just enough to where you hear it subtly and then go, 'This kind of reminds me of that time.'

I'd like to do a complete album of covers with no songs written after 1937.

My musical taste is somewhat dated - I mean, freeze frame, go back 60 years, and you're in my comfort zone.

I think you have a lot of really good artists today. You have your Beyonce, Usher, Nicki Minaj and the like. But our generation, the artists were stronger. You're talking about myself, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack, Gladys Knight, The Temptations, The Four Tops.

Representing not just the resurrection of a career, 1953 marked 37-year-old Frank Sinatra's creative emergence as the best singer of his century.

Of the great singing stars of the 1940s and '50s, only one - Nat King Cole - died young, at age 45.

I think I'd be a million times more successful and more iconic if I was a singer in the '40s. I'd be allowed a level of mystery, and I think I'd suit that decade.

Looking back at those great singers like Gordon MacRae and Howard Keel - they have such a specific kind of style that it seems like we don't really appreciate anymore.

I just pretty much love from 1966 to 1972, that's my time. I think everything that needs to be said was said within that time. That's just a subjective thing, as well.

I think The Doors are one of the classic groups, and I think we're all tempted to feel like the time in which we grew up was somehow special, but I really do believe that there were two golden eras in music: The Forties and Fifties of big band, jazz and swing, and the Sixties and Seventies of rock. To me, they're really unparalleled.

I want people to feel what it was like in the '40s. That's when popular music in the United States was so beautiful. Frank Sinatra, the Pied Pipers, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holiday. That's when popular music had deeper values, to me. This was music that was selling millions of records.

The Best of Elvis Presley, Doris Day, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Hailey and the Comets, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Frankie Laine all topped the charts in the '50s. Load a playlist of rock n' roll royalty. You're spoilt for choice.

I grew up listening to legends such as Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Tony Bennett.

I kept looking to do songs that were written years ago and would live or outlive all of us, and the one thing they had in common was Sinatra.

People like Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Marlene Dietrich and Sammy Davis Jr. all walked me down this path of entertainment.

The run I was on made Sinatra, Flynn, Jagger, Richards, all of them look like droopy-eyed armless children.