Musician Quotes

All I have to concentrate on is my performing.

I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I do know how to count.

My only failure was the restaurant in Myrtle Beach. I kept it open for four years. It was in a tourist town, it was only busy four and half, five months of the year. But the bills kept coming all year.

They're not particular about whether you're playing a flatted fifth or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance to it.

I'd like to play for you one of my compositions, my only composition.

I think the idea is now for blacks to write about the history of our music. It's time for that, because whites have been doing it all the time. It's time for us to do it ourselves and tell it like it is.

How do I know why Miles walks off the stage? Why don't you ask him? And besides, maybe we'd all like to be like Miles, and just haven't got the guts.

I always try to teach by example and not force my ideas on a young musician. One of the reasons we're here is to be a part of this process of exchange.

Men have died for this music. You can't get more serious than that.

It's taken me all my life to learn what not to play.

I don't care much about music. What I like is sounds.

Well I think in all the thirty years I've been doing this now and being gone from home and all that stuff it's really, it's not about what I've achieved and if I've become a better player, or played better ten years ago than I do today.

This record for the first time - feels like a record that really represents my whole entire life and instead of just a period of my life. And it is really kind of eye opening and it makes me feel really good to hear this record and hear all the years.

This is just strictly me wanting to make a record that is the real deal. It is all the stuff that I have learned and know that I remember. It's what I perceive as country music is about.

The real beauty of it - key to my life was playing key chords on a banjo. For somebody else it may be a golf club that mom and dad put in their hands or a baseball or ballet lessons. Real gift to give to me and put it in writing.

The real amazing thing about all of this is I think I've maintained the mentality of a musician throughout it all, which I'm proudest of. And I'm still playing on people's records and singing on people's records.

The funny thing is, people's perceptions of what a song is about is usually wrong a majority of the time. But they're still going to read what they want to into it.

So I didn't have anything to do with picking the songs, but I got to musically take them in places I thought might be interesting, so it was a real neat collaboration among the three of us.

My last two records that I made were both quite pointed in one direction and I think I do my best stuff when it's all over the map, when there's a couple traditional things, a couple pretty rocking things.

It really does take a lot of time to make records, to be in the studio and do all that stuff.

It is not that I don't like contemporary country music because I do. I love it. I have recorded a lot and have had great success recording records that have not been very traditional country records.

It is not fun singing about losing somebody like that, but at the same time it was easy to write because the memories were so real and vivid and so much a part of who I am.

It is easy to react if everything is going great.

I've always been more drawn to being normal than being famous.

I mean, look at her. Any idiot, you know, would quite taken with Amy.

I made records in the past that are as traditional as any other country records that have been made, but at the same time the records have a contemporary slant on it too.

I had just lost my dad and I remembered all the songs we used to go and hear at concerts, and the records around the house and sometimes we'd play together.

I formally proposed. I'm a good Southern gentleman.

I do not like being famous. I like being normal.

I can sit and analyze everything and beat myself up and say you don't quite sing as good as you used to, you're writing better songs maybe than you used to, but to me it's just the journey.