“In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.”

Bertolt Brecht

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“The devil doesn’t have any music.”

Mavis Staples

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“Increasingly I think of myself as some strange and solitary conductor, introduced to a group of very dynamic musicians who happen to be my characters, and I have no idea how they are going to play together, and I have certainly no idea how I am going to put manners on them. I stroll out there into the emptiness of the pit and ask them for music. Who knows what they’re going to give me?”

Colum McCann

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“I am very influenced by the people who influenced my influences, and I am influenced even more by the people who influenced them.”

M. Ward

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“Children make up the best songs, anyway. Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and then throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one.”

Tom Waits

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“I think I get so in love with a band that I just end up pretty much copying them. And I hope that the originality can come from the fact that you’re in love with 1,000 bands and they’re all completely different. So that when you copy all of them at once, that’s how you create something new.”

Jack Steadman

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“I want records to be like newspapers. I’d like them to come out at least once a week, or twice a week. With this song [‘Instant Karma!’], we wrote it in the morning, recorded and re-mixed it and got it out in a week, here and in the States, which was pretty fast and moving. I want it to be like that, you know. I want to be able to put it out as it happens. I write songs about what’s happening to me at that moment and I want it to be out at that moment. I don’t care what name goes on it.”

John Lennon

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“Everyone thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head—they somehow formed in his head—and all he had to do was write them down, and they would kind of be manifest to the world. But what I think is so interesting, and what would really be a lesson that everybody should learn, is that things come out of nothing. Things evolve out of nothing. You know, that the tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest. And then the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing. And I think this would be important for people to understand, because it gives people confidence in their own lives that that’s how things work.
        If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted—they have these wonderful things in their head but you’re not one of them, you’re just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that—then you live a different kind of life. You could have another kind of life, where you say, well, I know that things come from nothing very much, and start from unpromising beginnings. And I’m an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.”

Brian Eno

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“If you break open a song, you’ll find the eggs of other songs.”

Tom Waits

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“Anyone who’s grown up listening to albums and then to CDs can’t help but feel sad about the atomization of music consumption. It would be like if we couldn’t publish a book anymore, only chapters.”

Jennifer Egan

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“All of us have a personal sound that’s coming from our limitations. What makes a sound unique is the inability to do what we’re trying to do. You know that thing about Miles Davis: when he was young and trying to play like Dizzy Gillespie, he said he couldn’t play that high or that fast. If he could have just played like Dizzy Gillespie, then there wouldn’t be any Miles Davis.”

Bill Frisell

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“Failure is a big source of innovation in music.”

Brian Eno

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“Bands, especially when they’re good ones, can be like families, but unlike biological families—at least unlike my biological family—people in my band listen to each other.”

Marc Ribot

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“For a songwriter, you don’t really go to songwriting school. You learn by listening to tunes, and you try to understand them and take them apart and see what they’re made of, and wonder if you can make one, too. You know, and you just do it by picking up the needle and putting it back down and figuring out how these people did this magical thing. It’s like—it’s rather mystifying when you think about songs, where they come from and how they’re born.”

Tom Waits

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“I think this whole division between the genres has more to do with marketing than anything else. It’s terrible for the culture of music.”

Tom Waits

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