Music Context Quotes

I listen more to music when I'm on my computer. I'm into the latest YouTube thing. I'm a nanosecond kind of listener, but if I'm driving I would be listening to a Merle Haggard box set. It's a weird experience listening to 'Working Man Blues' by Merle Haggard and cruising around in a Porsche.

There's a guy at the record company who's 30, and he says, I would not listen to these songs except in this context. Somehow the recording process, the arrangements, make it more accessible.

It's interesting how some songs really lend themselves to performance in a big public venue and performance by a band and so on, and so they're even more successful in that context than they were on the record.

The music for 'The Departed' could have been played by an orchestra, but you make a decision about orchestration based on the context of the film. You want the music to broaden the scope of a film, not just repeat what you're seeing.

I have been told that I have been played at - my music's been played at funerals, deaths, births, weddings. Weddings, I find very surprising.

A tune has to resonate with whatever is happening around it.

I write songs for people who drive in cars. I really do.

In Arab culture, music is for celebration. You don't play music at funerals.

Every conversation we have as a band is about gender in some way, and it's been like that from the beginning.

Are we, as humans, gaining any insight on how to talk about ourselves and how something as abstract as a Charlie Parker record gets us into a dialogue about our emotions and our thoughts? Sometimes we lose sight that the music has a wider context. So I want to continue those dialogues. Those are the things I want to foster.

The craziest thing is that the song ["My President"] is real but you can still hear it in the club.

I didn't really want to write about music very much in 'High Fidelity.' I wanted to write about the relationship stuff, and the music stuff is kind of a bit of fun on top and something to frame it with.

My music reflects the time on which we live, both in terms of arrangements, as well as in the subjects treated in the lyrics.

You have to understand a bit about the poetry of the blues to know where the references are coming from.

People need to put my music in a perspective where they use other established artists from the past, and almost all the names I see related to my music are great musicians.

'I'm Broken' was a sound check riff.

Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context.

When I came to New York, to Brooklyn, I met Alvin Ailey and Stanley Crouch and August Wilson. They were always putting things in a philosophical context. All the great jazz musicians did, too. There was always a sub-context to what they were saying about music even though they would be very down home and earthy. So I started to develop, in addition to my power and ability to simply hear, a way to place myself in a time.

The thing I like about 'Nashville,' it just happens to be about musicians, and all the music is practical, meaning it's performed at a concert or during a rehearsal.

I'm not sure I ever try to make a case for the music. I mean, sometimes the music isn't even that good. I just tell the band's stories; if I describe the music, it's to explain how it moved the overall story along.

I meet young people who know me and are familiar with my stuff. They know the package. They might have cherry-picked five or six key tunes. That's how it seems to work. I sometimes wonder if they realise they are not getting the whole context.

I'm thinking in terms of a point of departure, a field of action for performers to express an expressive need of mine which hopefully the context of music would convey.

In 'Queen,' songs were the part of events happening in the story, and that is where we enjoy music. We dance at weddings, we lip sync at bars and discos, and there are special moments in life which need background music. It should be depicted in films in the same way.

I think that in order for music to be heard in a lot of different situations you have to always consider that.

In horror movies, you can write music that if it was performed on the concert stage would have the audience running out of the room with their fingers in their ears. But in a movie, all of a sudden it becomes incredibly accessible and appreciated.