Musical Compromise Quotes

My guitar only has five strings 'cause the top one broke and I decided not to put it back on: when I play chords I only play bar chords, and the top one always used to cut me there.

Many musicians will say they don't care about the money yet they must commit themselves to appear at given times and places, and to produce what sells, whether they believe in it or not. It depends on contracts.

Toplines usually suck. I'll send a song to a band or artist whose entire body of work I love and I'll ask them to do a vocal for one of my songs and I'll get it back and I'll hate it so much. It might have to do with my possessiveness over my music.

Our music doesn't make many compromises, but we take it into a venue that's larger than people expect.

You don't want to get stuck with a record that you've done with someone that you feel obligated to put out - that's not really dope, just because you made an effort to get together and work.

I expect the audience to come up to my level. I am not interested in compromising my music to make it palatable to an assumed sub-standard mass.

If any of our songs ever did make it on the top ten, I'd disband the group immediately.

We try and stay out of the corporate side of it. The band has never compromised. At some point in our career we could have made a certain type of record and sold millions of units, as they are called.

We legitimately walked into 'Anthem' head-on, not paying enough attention to internal band tension.

I tell everybody, if you've got a band that works, it's a miracle. It's never going to be perfect, but if it works on some level, hold on to it with both hands and don't ever let it go.

I've turned down songs that would be much easier to play on the radio that I don't think should be on the album. Maybe I've shot myself in the foot.

I've been in a band, so I understand the politics. Sometimes the bass player doesn't like what the guitar player is doing, and you have to sort of even that out.

I am a really passive person to begin with so I have written a lot of pretty crappy songs with strangers because I let it go in a direction that I didn't feel it should have and I didn't know them well enough to speak up.

I was more of a melodic player. Angus was more into the rock world. Straightaway, I said this is how we should do it. It was never a brotherly squabble but the opposite, because we just wanted to do good as a band.

The song 'Bite the Thong' in particular, with Damon Albarn, really encapsulates the whole dilemma of, 'Hmm, should I stay on the underground when everybody else is selling out?' Nowadays, you can just do it - have your name-brand clothes, do songs with rock n' rollers - and it's not considered selling out.

I've always been much more of a guitar picker, but I began to feel forced into a position of being the epitome of a rock & roll guitarist. Originally, TYA wanted to make it without having to compromise to pop. It worked for a while, but after five or six years, the fun went out of it for me; a lot of the music went out of it.

My vocal ability is very limited, but I'm fortunate in that I can write the songs around my vocal limitations.

You couldnt get a job playing in a club unless you played so much Top 40 and so many Beatles songs. I just went into a sort of revolt.

I sometimes feel it is to my disadvantage that I have not conducted the Cleveland Orchestra or the Boston or Chicago symphonies, but then I have had to sacrifice something in order to have enough time with my orchestras.

The hardest part, for me, is being in the band and knowing the way I want certain things to sound, but also having to listen to opinions, and very valid opinions, of my bandmates. So, sometimes, I'll have to have conversations with them as a producer and then conversations with them as a bandmate.

It's really not hard to keep your dignity and sign to a major label... Most people don't have any dignity in the first place.

I'm not too fond of changing things into waltzes, but sometimes that works.

Most of the time, you're writing for radio, you're writing for a label, you're writing to stick a hit, and you end up coming out with something that isn't necessarily genuine.

If it had remained always my band, my natural tendency would have been to get more complex and arrange things more and more. That wouldn't necessarily be good for Eddie, or anyone else in the band.

We don't want Offspring-itis, Green Day-itis: you know, that thing where bands are all over the place at once, getting everything at once - major airplay on radio, major airplay on MTV.