Music as Expression Quotes

I've been obsessed with seeing life through music. My records, my relationship with records, my relationship with rock stars, everything that surrounds it, has been really one of the only ways that I ever started to understand the world.

As long as we live there is never enough singing.

Maybe this is a made-up belief to preserve myself, but I do believe that everyone has a purpose, and my purpose is to put out music that means something.

I always try to relate a song to something what is going on, the working man, the times, how life goes.

I grew up in a house full of musicians, and my mum really taught me that when you listen to an album, you respect that it's somebody's art, and that the B-sides are just as important as the singles, and we should really listen to the album all the way through the way it was intended to be listened to.

I do have a big problem with the idea of music as a form of communication unless it's political - and that's where it's tricky because a lot of music is political, even if it's not overtly so. But my music isn't that; it's about a feeling.

My experience is that white kids love hip-hop, and brown and black kids love rock music. That shows that brown kids - they carry emotion, they carry pain, they carry oppression and strife.

Rock n' roll was my art school. For many people from working-class backgrounds, rock wasn't a chosen thing, it was the only thing: the only avenue of creativity available for them.

Music in Iran is considered a safety valve for the state …. We don’t have music in Iran.

Everything changes all the time, and unfortunately, everyone who knows what you do by buying records only hears a small amount of what's going on in your life.

In one of my songs, I say fame is nothing more than loving someone. So I'm grateful every day that there's so many fans of people out there that love my music and feel they're connected to me through that.

Musicians want to be the loud voice for so many quiet hearts.

I think it's always been especially hard for black people to let go of musicians who do heinous things because music is such an integral part of our existence.

They hear it come out, but they don't know how it got there. They don't understand that's life's way of talking. You don't sing to feel better. You sing 'cause that's a way of understanding life.

I think music is what takes the experience off the screen into your soul, into your head.

I really went back through a lot of the dark corridors of my life in this. I wanted people to know who I am based on my music, not on what they read in the tabloids.

There's no huge, deep message in any of the songs. We recorded a few months of being human.

As someone who worships music, I believe it can never be ugly!

There was a certain feeling I developed as a young person for black people. Somehow they were able to get pleasure out of things that I couldn't see them enjoying. I heard them sing a lot, and I didn't hear white folks going down the cotton rows singing that much.

Usually I just let my songs do the talking. As a matter of fact I have long had an aversion to celebrities endorsing politics, and in some cases even other causes. I wonder about their motives. And I have to admit when celebrities get involved in political campaigns I tend to get a little bit sarcastic about it.

Small clubs aren't as lucrative, but spiritually, they're my favorite places to play. It's a homey kind of thing. I refer to it as the Church of What's Happening Now.

I'm not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down.

I can't just listen to music walking down the street unless I have a reason to. I can't just listen to music as a piece of junk in the background. It drives me insane.

I know that I'm not a criminal. People say that, but my music speaks for itself. And I believe in my music.

I've always loved music. I listen to music the way a lot of actors watch movies.