Musical Purity Quotes

Steve Earle had a mainstream career. Dwight Yoakam had a mainstream career. Willie Nelson did. But they always made good music, they always stuck to who they were. They weren't relying on radio like a lot of people are in Nashville.

The way we're going about things and what we want to do, we feel it has to be a really pure essence of music. That's where you get the most out of it.

Here's something weird, though: I loved Jimi's music so much that I would never perform it for people. Throughout my teens and playing in various bands, I refused to play Hendrix songs. I know that sounds strange, but Jimi's music was so special to me that it was like works of art that shouldn't be touched or altered.

My biggest obstacle is trying to keep the music pure to what I want to release. I don't want any corporate suit telling me what story to tell.

The thing about punk is that there are purists. Once you start going outside of that, they don't think what you're doing is punk rock.

Sphere Music - Some sounds seem to reverberate along the plain, and then settle to earth again like dust; such are Noise, Discord, Jargon. But such only as spring heavenward, and I may catch from steeples and hilltops in their upward course, which are the more refined parts of the former, are the true sphere music - pure, unmixed music - in which no wail mingles.

I try to play the bare essence, to let everything be just what it's supposed to be in that particular spot...You have many things to pick from when you're playing, so you try to train yourself to pick out the best things that you know.

It was 100 percent music. There was no ego involved, no attitudes, no black and white, it was pure music.

I would rather fall flat on my face than try to just make a quick dollar by making music that fits into the radio format right now. It does nothing for me.

When I sing, I close my eyes. If I see a feather, everything is fine. Without this image in my mind, the sound is not 'truthful' enough, and I must begin again. I have to.

The music of Mozart is of such purity and beauty that one feels he merely found it - that it has always existed as part of the inner beauty of the universe waiting to be revealed.

Bluegrass has a very, very strict musical form. Once you start to dilute it, it disappears.

I had never heard anyone play like Benny Goodman and had never seen anyone like him on the stage. I realize now that what impressed me and stayed with me in memory was - the sounds he made. He played so purely. The music seemed to come from him, not just the instrument he played with such mastery.

When I think of a lot of the players I admire, they could always play their parts without hiding behind distortion and sustain.

Listen to the great guitarists of the Fifties. They didn't do that nasty sort of industrial distortion. They played musical compositions as solos - Scotty Moore, Cliff Gallup, Django Reinhardt. There wasn't a bad note in any of those solos. I listened to that and stayed with those rules.

A guitar riff played on a piano doesn't come close to the purity of it being played on a guitar but I faked it enough to get by.

The holy grail for a music fan is to hear music from another planet, which has not been influenced by us whatsoever. Or, even better, from lots of different planets. The closest we got to that was before the Internet, when people didn't know of each other's existence. Now, that doesn't really happen.

I've never been one that thinks that the function of an instrument is to approach the purity of voice or the structure of a beautifully sung line.

The jazz I love is sweet and pure with raw elements, which is exactly what the good hip-hop is doing now.

There is no music in hell, for all good music belongs to heaven.

I find that I never lose Bach. I don't know why I have always loved him so. Except that he is so pure, so relentless and incorruptible, like a principle of geometry.

When I make a lot of really good music with someone, I want to let the world hear it right now; unfiltered. I don't think it has to be more complicated than that.

I like all the kinds of music I've been into. I'm certainly not a purist in that I will only play country licks in a country song or blues licks in blues stuff. The thing I would like to be able to do is to make the music sound right no matter what it is. If somebody else wants to have a label for it, then that's their business.

I sometimes ponder on variation form and it seems to me it ought to be more restrained, purer.

Miles Davis turned his back to the audience when he came out on stage, and he offended people. But, he wasn't there to entertain; he was all about the music. I kind of do that.