Musical Ambiguity Quotes

I grew up in the '90s and remember the lyrics back then were so abstract and open to interpretation. That always drove me crazy.

Like, Mission Of Burma to me always sounded almost like they were part of the British Arty New Wave. I kind of like that. I like not being able to tell the difference.

If you can even manage to tell exactly what a song is about, all you do is put that song in a box forever, and it loses its evocative power.

I have a very difficult time describing my music. Because I run into people in the hardware store and they go, 'Oh, you're a musician. So what kind of music do you play?' And I go, 'Uh, I've been doin' this for many years - I don't know what to call it.'

We're falling into a place where melody is somewhat lacking in music. Everybody feels like, okay, too much melody or too much harmony, and it kind of goes over people's heads; they don't understand it.

People always say 'Etta, you know what your problem is? You're neither fish nor fowl. There is no place to rack you.' When I would go in a record shop, you might find one or two records by me in different stacks.

Arriving at a simple piece of music is a very difficult balance because, in being simple, you could easily be banal, so maybe it's more difficult to write a simple piece of music than a 12-tone piece where no one understands exactly what it is about.

With rock, you can write about anything. There are rock songs I still don't know what they're singing about, but you want to get up and dance.

I never fit in with straight country. I never really fit in with rock n' roll. I've always been somewhere in between all this stuff.

I used to be fast and loose with the term 'country' because I didn't know what else to call my music. I still don't.

Instrumental music is nonverbal and thus radically ambiguous. It doesn't lend itself to what might be called content-oriented analysis, though plenty of intellectuals have tried to analyze it in precisely that way.

I don't know that my voice ever makes sense anywhere, necessarily. I would sing bluegrass music, and I don't fit in there; I would sing rock music, and I'm probably a little too hillbilly for that. And country, I'm too much rock n' roll for there sometimes.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

I can't describe my sound. That's something I don't ever think about and I kinda don't want to think about it.

I think dissonance in music makes you think. It isn't, 'Oh, that's a pretty melody I can whistle.' You have to sit down and listen to tell it apart from other things.

One thing that's really important to me in my music is mystery.

In some century to come, when the school children will whistle popular tunes in quarter-tones--when the diatonic scale will be as obsolete as the pentatonic is now--perhaps then these borderland experiences may be both easily expressed and readily recognized. But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense

I've always been drawn to ambiguity in pop music.

Maybe in the future, you'll be able to understand what I'm saying. I'm going more for an atmospheric vibe in my songs. And I really don't want to ruin the illusions people may create for themselves.

I always laugh at these rock n'rollers where you can't understand them. Mind you, it's not because they're inaudible or indistinguishable; it's because they're too obscure.