Musician Quotes

Hunter can write a melody and stuff like that, but his forte is lyrics. He can write a serviceable melody to hang his lyrics on, and sometimes he comes up with something really nice.

And for me there's still more material than 20 lifetimes that I can use up.

And there's a lot of that stuff with people bringing their kids, kids bringing their parents, people bringing their grandparents - I mean, it's gotten to be really stretched out now. It was never my intention to say, this is the demographics of our audience.

And the live show is still our main thing.

So it's one of those things where we have to - our problem is pacing ourselves and still reaching a large enough number of our audience. Because we don't want to burn the audience. And we don't want to be excluding anybody.

Our strong suit is what we do, and our audience.

But hey, when you live in Watts, you need a little smack to get by, you know what I mean? You need something soft and comfortable in your life, 'cause you're not going to get it from what's around you. And society isn't going to give it to you.

America is still mostly xenophobic and racist. That's the nature of America, I think.

I mean, just because you're a musician doesn't mean all your ideas are about music. So every once in a while I get an idea about plumbing, I get an idea about city government, and they come the way they come.

And as far as I'm concerned, it's like I say, drugs are not the problem. Other stuff is the problem.

Stuff that's hidden and murky and ambiguous is scary because you don't know what it does.

Death comes at you no matter what you do in this life, and to equate drugs with death is a facile comparison.

I mean, whatever kills you kills you, and your death is authentic no matter how you die.

For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.

I'm shopping around for something to do that no one will like.

But audio is a component of video, so there's always been that anyway, and although we've never expressed a visual side apart from the Grateful Dead movie, I don't find it that remote, you know what I mean? It's a departure of sorts, but it's like a first cousin.

I don't know why, it's the same reason why you like some music and you don't like others. There's something about it that you like. Ultimately I don't find it's in my best interests to try and analyze it, since it's fundamentally emotional.

I read somewhere that 77 per cent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I'm more intrigued by the 23 per cent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves.

If we had any nerve at all, if we had any real balls as a society, or whatever you need, whatever quality you need, real character, we would make an effort to really address the wrongs in this society, righteously.

I think it's too bad that everybody's decided to turn on drugs, I don't think drugs are the problem. Crime is the problem. Cops are the problem. Money's the problem. But drugs are just drugs.

Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.

You have to react to what's around you in the moment, whatever the music is. Just think of it as some place you have to enter and you need to find the key.

When we are on tour we also take chances.

There's a certain phraseology involved in jazz, and I've moved away from that.

The only element of jazz that I keep is improvisation.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails, but that's what we face when we're dealing with improvisation.

If you feel you have the right key, you try to make some phrase or sound that will fit.

I feel very strongly when there's no chance for me to find a key to a piece.

Coltrane was moving out of jazz into something else. And certainly Miles Davis was doing the same thing.

What I liked about doing a soundtrack is that it's almost the opposite of any kind of normal recording that a band does, because it's very much a restricted, narrow... And I kind of like that, I find it exciting to work within these things.