Musical Simplicity Quotes

I don't regard myself as a soloist. It's a color; I put it in for excitement. It's not great loss if a solo has to go. We've made songs without solos.

The simplest beats, on what rock music or any music has been formed on, can be the toughest beats to execute and perform, because it's really easy to not respect a simple 4/4 beat, because people always want to play fast.

Everything can't be a postage-stamp-sized project. Everything can't be a chamber piece. Musicals aren't even meant to be that, or identified with it... It's none of it simple.

I don't understand why Europeans and South Americans can take more sophistication. Why is it that Americans need to hear their happiness major and their tragedy minor, and as jazzy as they can handle is a seventh chord? Are they not experiencing complex emotions?

The saxophone is actually a translation of the human voice, in my conception. All you can do is play melody. No matter how complicated it gets, it's still a melody.

One yearns unspeakably for a composer who gives out his pair of honest themes, and then develops them unashamed, and then hangs a brisk coda to them, and then shuts up.

I tried the guitar, but it had two strings too many. It was just too complicated, man! Plus, I grew up with Steve Cropper. There were so many good guitar players, another one wasn't needed. What was needed was a bass.

Music is just air moving around.

I'm not technical. When I listen to music, I gravitate more toward the sonic aspect of it. The technical stuff of it, I get bored with it. These long solos? OK, already. You know your scales, big deal. I know it, too, but I don't want to do that.

I really enjoy playing solo acoustic. I think it's good for me as a songwriter to stay in touch with what it takes to make a song work by yourself.

Part of me is probably more conservative than people realise. I like my old string quartets, I don't like music that's trippy for trippy's sake.

One chord is fine. Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz.

Piano is one of those instruments you don't have to be good at to sound good - you just have to know where to put three little fingers, which is really pretty easy to figure out.

Being a three piece, maybe it's easier. You only have two other guys, musically, and everything else to contend with and work with.

The older I get, the more I just like plugging directly into my amp. I'm tired of trying to impress myself with weird sounds. It's about the notes more.

I'd been thinking I'd have to learn how to play really well, but obviously the message of punk was that you just learn three chords in a week and you're away.

I love when an artist can stand by themselves and play their guitar and hold a crowd, but I also love bells and whistles.

There was this big skiffle craze happening for a while in England.... Everybody was in a skiffle group..All you needed was an acoustic Guitar, a washboard with thimbles for percussion, and a tea-chest- you know, the ones they used to ship tea from India- and you just put a broom handle on it and a bit of string, and you had a bass..you only needed two chords; Jing-jinga-jing jing-jinga-jing jing-jinga-jing jing-jinga-jing. And I think that's basically where i've always been at. I'm just a skiffler, you know. Now I do posh skiffle, that's all it is.

I wanted to hear the songs in the way that I had written them, which was very basic. All I wanted was drums and another guitar, and I was just going to sing.

My blues are so simple, but so few people can play it right

I have been accused of being a very simplistic, very lyrical player, and that's okay. That just comes from the blues, which is my background. But every day you wake up and transcend. You can't ever rest on your laurels.

There are no limitations with a song. To me a song is a little piece of art. It can be whatever you like it to be. You can write the simplest song, and that's lovely, or you can just write a song that is abstract art.

I haven't been walking around for years with some burning desire to do a solo record. If I had, maybe I'd have made a record that was experimental. Usually, the idea of a solo record is to get some weird stuff out of your system, but I don't think like that. I wasn't interested in making something that was a hard listen - maybe I'll get around to that some other time. I wanted it to sound effortless, not like I was trying to reinvent the wheel.

'You Are So Beautiful,' I think, is probably the, you know, the strongest tune I ever did in just the simplicity in 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.