Setlist Quotes

When I write the set, I try to create something that will not only be interesting for the audience, but will have a flow for the band, too, so we don't get boring.

When I'm DJing for two hours, I might play two or three Smiths songs.

Normally, when I write the setlist for a Dream Theater show, I'll change it up every night, and we can basically play whatever we want.

We're doing Circle of Snakes, we open up with Skin Carver and we are throwing in Skull Forest later on.

Once you've been on tour six, seven years, you get an idea of what works and what doesn't work universally. There will be some crowds that we just can't play a song, but we've got 90% of a show that we know is going to be a hit with the Lupe Fiasco fan. I think the catering has already been done.

In September 1968, Rush played for around 20 people at a small hall in a church basement. We played songs like 'Spoonful,' 'Fire' and 'Born Under a Bad Sign,' and got paid $10. Then we went to a nearby deli and ordered Cokes and French fries and started planning our future.

I don't want to go on tour and have everyone just sitting there waiting for one song.

Bands don't play the whole LP. They play a selection of the songs that they like.

I've always kind of been a little skeptical about bands that won't play their hits. That's really arrogant to me as a music fan. I do want to hear obscure songs, but like most people, I want to hear the hits, so we always play them.

Usually for the tour, there's about 80 songs in our brain.

I hope that the next time you go to a concert, the band doesn't play the song you wanna hear! And instead, they just play songs off their new album!

I did some research and tried to pull out some old, classic Van Halen that they had not played in 10 or 15 years. I think that was Sammy's mistake. I he didn't want to do the Dave stuff.

As far as my favorite songs to perform live, most of the songs we did live were my favorite. If they weren't, I would have gotten rid of them.

To do more of a concert thing, it takes so much preparation. You don't just show up and wing it. You're putting countless hours in the studio, not just to write and produce stuff, but to come up with edits and special things for the show.

It always disappoints me when I go to a concert and they don't play my favorite song, or at least one of their biggest hits.

And that format was - we'd been using that format, I guess, since the late '70s, and it was starting to get very predictable. In other words, certain songs would surface in the same points in the set every so often; it was like rotation.

I have a hard time narrowing things down to ten or 12 songs. If I walk off stage in anything less than two hours, it just feels strange. It feels early.

The problem with the Moodies is not what to play, it's what to leave out! That's always difficult. We stopped having support acts many years ago just because of that. We needed getting on to two hours; there's such a big catalog to call on.

I would find the idea of compiling a setlist that doesn't wildly excite me to be too restricting.

If you're going to a show that we're providing support for, or a large festival, you're obviously going to see a condensed version. We have to shave off some fat from the show, so we have to stick to the so-called 'bangers.'

It's not a bad problem to have because a lot of classic acts are known for one or two songs and in their show they basically hold those songs off until the end and you sit through an hour or so of lesser known material but in our case most of the songs are well known.

To passively get up and play a bunch of old songs wouldn't have really motivated us. So we are bringing the new material into the set and it goes down really well.

I'm constantly preparing. Material hits me; I'm always writing. I go back and listen to my shows and just prepare and put my set together. But the day of, I like to have some downtime. A nice lunch is important for me.

We never do the same set twice... We play for at least two and a half hours, sometimes longer, so there's a lot of songs from all the records. And we know there's a stable we as fans would want to hear, so we always give them, then we change up a bunch of songs and throw in a couple new ones.

When you make records, you gotta think about what's going to be happening at the concert.