Musical Perfection Quotes

We want to be good at our craft, whether it's writing music or playing it live.

When Sonic Youth wrote music, we would rehearse for months before anybody heard anything.

It takes so much energy and time to make one song perfect.

Starting a band is the easy part. Once you've formed the band, you have to tell a story, and that story requires songs. And not just good songs, but great songs. After a while, great songs won't do - they have to be the best. Success doesn't make it any easier. Each time I start a new record, it's a brand-new search.

We're very much perfectionists, so when we're putting on a huge show and want to play to the best of ability, we rehearse intensely. And I have a guitar pretty much in my hand for at least five hours before doing a show. I'm just noodling and mucking around and working on some of the songs here and there.

There is nothing to compare with the instantaneous feedback a singer gets from the people sitting in front of him. That is where it all comes together - all the rehearsing and working to get everything just exactly right.

Anton Bruckner wrote the same symphony nine times, trying to get it just right. He failed.

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.

Music is all about wanting to be better at it.

You can either make it come around or you can't. By the time we would be ready to record a song, we would know for sure that it was the best way we could do it.

I am notoriously hard on myself in terms of working on new material and while I am critical of my performance on the Led Zeppelin material, I am way more critical of my own stuff. I'm pretty hard on myself.

I was spoiled by Monk's music because it was so good, so complete.

The only time I'm miserable is when I can't keep an instrument in tune.

Every time you write a song, you're looking for some sort of perfection, and you never quite reach it. You're always looking for that extra missing piece.

There are times, like with Dire Straits, where you can get as close as you can be to being good at your instrument and not cross over to that tasteless place.

If you listen to Louis Armstrong from 1929, you will never hear anything better than that really, and you will never hear anything more free than that.

Perhaps the most serious complaint you could make about Bach is that he has every quality of humanity except imperfection.

Growing up in a bluegrass or acoustic-oriented world, the musicians become so focused on performance, as far as playing. We tend to overanalyze the notes, so you're always trying to sharpen everything up.

I already experimented with free jazz in the 1960s and, in my opinion, to play free jazz, you have to be a perfect musician and a perfect human being - and none of us are!

If one were asked to name one musician who came closest to composing without human flaw, I suppose general consensus would choose Johann Sebastian Bach.

In music, four is the number that every measure is - four by four, four beats to every measure. The number four is a sense of completion, almost.

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.

Humans are imperfect. That's one of the reasons that classical and jazz are in trouble. We're on the quest for the perfect performance and every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life.

At last a dream come true. The Instrument of Instruments.

As a man I am flawed, but my music is perfect.