Musical Response Quotes

It is very rare that I am just coming up with melodies off the top of my head. I usually am responding to something - it could be chains dragging on the floor - but I am usually responding to something.

Thundercat, specifically, is insane. I'm always surprised at the things he comes up with when we're jamming out together. I gotta try to keep up with him and his ideas, be able to respond without speaking, and come through with some more music. He challenges me to keep it musical and not so computer.

I respond to mood. I hear some phrase, or pick up a rhythm.

I remember when 'I'm Moving On' came out, and we got the response we did, I thought, 'Man, this could be for real.' That was the first time it dawned on me what we had.

If you play a tune and a person don't tap their feet, don't play the tune.

If I'm playing a violin thing, for instance, I tend to respond to that sound with the way I finger.

My songs emerge unbidden and unplanned and completely on a schedule of their own...We have, all of us, over the years, written things that responded to the world as it slapped us in the face. Me and Nash, singing "To the Last Whale" and "Find the Cost of Freedom". Stills coming up with "For What It's Worth". These came right out of the news. People have accused us of taking stances and the truth is we don't.

But I did go to music really early on, even when I was 4 or 5, I was responding to music probably in ways other kids were not.

Sometimes I feel like I finish a song, and there's another song that I have to write in response to that song. Each is like its own separate feeling, its own separate universe.

I think the most important thing for a listener is to realize that he, too, should not listen to music in a passive way; that if you sit in a concert hall and expect to be moved or taken off your seat by the music, it will not happen.

Pianos - if they don't like what you're saying, then they won't talk back to you. And you want it to talk back to you.

I find I work best as a reactor, trying to portray something on a screen musically. If I were a boxer, I'd be a counter-puncher.

The one true comment on a piece of music is another piece of music.