“My ordinary state of mind is very much like the waiting room at the DMV.”

Leonard Cohen

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“If you’re given the tools, you have a responsibility to use them. I’m doing what I’m cut out to do, the best thing I can do, until they throw dirt on me.”

Kris Kristofferson

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“I found a new chord the other day. I was like, ‘Shit, if I had known that years ago…’ That’s what’s beautiful about the guitar. You think you know it all, but it keeps opening up new doors. I look at life as six strings and twelve frets. If I can’t figure out everything that’s in there, what chance do I have of figuring out anything else?”

Keith Richards

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“If I didn’t think it would work, I would be the first to say, ‘Forget it.’ But we’re fighting people’s misconceptions about what rock & roll is supposed to be. You’re supposed to do it when you’re twenty, twenty-five—as if you’re a tennis player and you have three hip surgeries and you’re done. We play rock & roll because it’s what turned us on. Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf—the idea of retiring was ludicrous to them. You keep going—and why not?”

Keith Richards

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“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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