Most artists have contracts directly with the record company, and when they do music, all of their music is owned by the record company. But I did mine through a production company. ~ Roy Ayers

Artists don't always know. Almost every song I ever recorded that was a hit at the majors that the promotional people picked I didn't think it would be a hit. I was wrong every time! ~ Roy Ayers

My whole career from the early 70s on has been mind-blowing. I didn't imagine in my life that I would ever be considered a guitar player first of all because I started off as a singer. ~ George Benson

I think repeating yourself is a sign of old age, telling the same joke again and again. Especially if they're jokes that don't make people laugh. ~ Simon Le Bon

Somebody said to me this morning, 'To what do you attribute your longevity?' I don't know. I mean, I couldn't have planned my life out better. By all accounts I should be dead! The abuse I put my body through: the drugs, the alcohol, the lifestyle I've lived the last 30 years! ~ Ozzy Osbourne

A legend is an old man with a cane known for what he used to do. I'm still doing it. ~ Miles Davis

Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read. ~ Frank Zappa

We all have idols. Play like anyone you care about but try to be yourself while you're doing so. ~ B. B. King

Everything government touches turns to crap. ~ Ringo Starr

The industry is a menace to artists. ~ Nikki Sixx

But again, it's the record company. If they don't want to promote a song, they don't make the effort to cross it over into other markets, and the fans don't get to know it. It's the same with my albums. ~ Prince

I think that's the problem in a lot of music. We've got these record labels. ~ Teena Marie

When I got into music, I didn't draw lines ... I was listening to all kinds of music at the same time. It wasn't a situation where I had all these categories. To understand all that about me is to know that, for me, it didn't represent a move from one thing to another. It was just one woman with many dialects. I like jazz, grew up on it. I still think it's American classical music. ~ Patrice Rushen

I had records like Turning Point, which easily went a million, but Brunswick never gave me an accurate accounting. I had records like I Had It All The Time and Without You In My Life; all of them went real big. They weren't fair you know, but I don't even care to talk about it much, if you know what I mean. ~ Tyrone Davis

I think that the Rolling Stones are fantastic. The Beatles are some of the greatest songwriters ever been - how can you speak against success. The Cream, I think they're fantastic. I didn't dig the Dave Clark Five. I thought it was a bunch of crap. ~ Little Richard

If you look at a record under a microscope, the high frequencies are short jagged edges... and the low frequencies are long swinging ones are deep bass sounds. When it cut it at half speed, you're getting more of those on the record. ~ Herb Alpert

Wish they could take my longevity and bottle it. ~ LL Cool J

I think I'm a focus for international attention. ~ Sting

U2 is an original species... there are colours and feelings and emotional terrain that we occupy that is ours and ours alone. ~ Bono

Back in the day, if someone said that hip hop and rap was a fad, that was a joke to me because they just didn't know what they were talking about. In reality, there were so many people who didn't know what they were talking about. ~ Jam Master Jay

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius. ~ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

If you put a Van Halen album in your record collection it will melt all the rest of your records. ~ David Lee Roth

[Edited 7/15/11 22:20pm]

"After I saw Jimi Hendrix play, I just went home and wondered what the fuck I was going to do with my life" ... Jeff Beck

"When I check into a Hotel I have them give me a call at 7am so I can go to bed".....Joe Walsh

"I'll play it first and tell you what it is later." - Miles Davis

"It costs a lot of money to look this cheap." -Dolly Parton

''Husbands are like fires - they go out when they're left unattended'' ..... Cher

''If you can't play it on an acoustic guitar or a grand piano then it's not a song'' ... Christopher Cross

''Mom told us we were going to work hard and send that money home and invest it'' ... Gladys Knight

''I regret not having had more time with my kids when they were growing up'' ... Tina Turner

"Wow, this is so good I could kiss David Bowie" ... Aretha Franklin

"Sure, I've slapped Tina... There have been times when I punched her to the ground without thinking. But I never beat her." Ike Turner

[Edited 7/16/11 4:38am]

"If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience."

~John Cage


"Rock critics like Elvis Costello because rock critics look like Elvis Costello."

~David Lee Roth


"I love perfect art, and I had to learn that you shouldn't look for perfection in life."

~Donald Fagen


"Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn."

~Charlie Parker


"My creed for art in general is that it should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise . . . a part of yourself you never knew existed."

~Bill Evans


"I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession. If you can, then it ain’t music, it’s close order drill, or exercise or yodeling or something, not music."

~Billie Holiday


"Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple."

~Charles Mingus


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

~Dizzy Gillespie


"The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen."

~Duke Ellington


"Modern Americans behave as if intelligence were some sort of hideous deformity."

~Frank Zappa


"Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music for the first time, as if I had never heard it before. Being so inescapably a part of it, I’ll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels, and that’s too bad."

~John Coltrane


"If you got up on the bandstand at Minton’s and couldn’t play, you were not only going to be embarrassed by the people ignoring you or booing you, you might get your ass kicked."

~Miles Davis


"We’re not like pop musicians who have to perform the same top ten tunes every night of a tour."

~Oscar Peterson


"When Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man (Louis Armstrong) who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing all over one of the great Louis’ tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that I would not have imagined possible’"

~Pat Metheny


"One thing about excellence, it’s an exclusive club. And it’s only for those who really want to pay dues to the shit. My daddy told me when I was a boy, ‘The only way you can be different from other people is to do some shit they don’t want to do."

~Wynton Marsalis


"As long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you otherwise might."

~Marian Anderson


"The downside of videos is that it will put my vision in front of other people, so they might not get the chance to create their own."

~Carole King


"You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having, but it would not be a good song, in my eyes, until it went through a period of sensitivity to a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song, it's just complaining."

~Joni Mitchell



"The young people look great on television. They’re youthful and have a lot of zip and energy, but when you see them live, they can only do about 20 minutes because they haven’t got the training to hold an audience for an hour and a half or so."

~Tony Bennett



"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."

~Hunter S. Thompson



"It's just a hundred channels of garbage all over. And not just here, it's in England as well. It's almost just like a global effort to knock the sense out of you if you're a musician (laughs). There's not any little morsel for musicians to latch on to. It's all glossy, lipstick s--t. More tits and bare midriffs. Unless you go to a blues club, or some outrageous, hip dive somewhere that nobody knows about until the night before, the pickings are slim for inspiration... "

~Jeff Beck

Music for adventurous listeners

tA

Tribal Records

It's terrible to get those comments, ... but at the same time, I am not 17 anymore. I have put in my time, and if you want to hear hard-core hip hop or rhyming, go back to the earlier albums. I can't pretend that I am in the same place I was when I was 17, 18 years old. ~ Andre 3000

Sometimes, I feel I am really blessed to be blind because I probably would not last a minute if I were able to see things. ~ Stevie Wonder

It's easy to be independent when you've got money. But to be independent when you haven't got a thing - that's the Lord's test. ~ Mahalia Jackson

Always surround yourself with people who are better than you. If you're hanging around bad people, they're going to start bringing you down . . . But, if you surround yourself with good people, they're going to be pulling you up. ~ Donny Osmond

When I first became famous, I didn't know if I could go where I wanted to because I didn't know how people were going to act. Some folks would scream and holler, and I didn't know what to do with that. ~ Jill Scott

Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it. ~ John Lennon

That blows me away… What he needs to do is call me and let’s do it together. I encourage everyone to get out there and buy Bob Dylan’s records. ~ LL Cool J on Bob doing a cover of Mama Said Knock You Out on his (Dylan) radio program

My older sister encouraged me from early on and bought me one of the first guitars I had. She listened to all of the crappy songs that I wrote when I was 8 years old and encouraged me to keep doing it. ~ Tracy Chapman

"Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read."
~Frank Zappa


"Critics don’t buy records. They get ‘em free."
~Nat King Cole


"Playing scales is like a boxer skipping rope or punching a bag. It's not the thing in itself; it's preparatory to the activity."
~Barney Kessel


"When a man’s faith is never tried, I don’t think he’ll ever learn anything. You have to have trial and tribulation, or what are you going to learn?"
~McCoy Tyner


"See, if you put a musician in a place where he has to do something different from what he does all the time, then he can do that-but he’s got to think differently in order to do it. I’ve always told the musicians in my band to play what they know, and then play above that. Because then anything can happen, and that’s where great art and music happens."
~Miles Davis


"Players get to that intermediate level where they can already play pretty good, and that’s kind of a dangerous period because they tend to start playing only the things that they can play, rather than the things they can’t."
~Pat Metheny


"I do know the older I get, the more I'm referencing music I heard as a kid."
~Bill Frisell


"We used to just go and jam, actually. We’d say ‘rehearsing’ just to make it sound, you know, official."
~Jimi Hendrix


"This experience could benefit Americans. People used to play instruments much more than they do today. If you play your music the best you can and you satisfy yourself, that's job one. Most people don't even get to do that. They don't play an instrument or paint a painting or write a story or create anything. But if you play, and you like it, you'll never be bored or feel left out. You'll be able to communicate and have this other dimension. Plus if you do a good job, people love it. They're so grateful that they send back this reaction that lets you know there is a reason. And that's a very good feeling."
~Ry Cooder


"Learning from other people is what music is all about."
~Neil Young


"An educated person is someone who can communicate with everyone."
~Taj Mahal


"You can learn the notes, but it's tough to learn his inflections, attitudes, and the informal spontaneity he had when he recorded that stuff. His playing was almost like a beautiful dance."
~Eric Johnson (on Hendrix)


"See, the thing with a lot of these writers is that they sort of have a pretty good grip on the English language. They can write something and sound intelligent. These kinds of scathing, really ridiculous things come off much better if they’re written like normal guys talk. I actually respect that stuff better—someone who says 'That shit from this motherfucker? He’s a sad son of a bitch!' [laughs] I’d get into that more and take it more seriously."
~Stanley Clarke


"Don't let your hands dictate what you think you can do. Look at fingerboard charts and imagine your eyes dancing on the notes you want to play, and forget about whether your hands can do it or not. Just try it."
~Allan Holdsworth




Music for adventurous listeners

tA

Tribal Records

theAudience said:

"Rock critics like Elvis Costello because rock critics look like Elvis Costello."

~David Lee Roth

I always thought this one was Gene Simmons, but either way it makes sense

theAudience said:

"You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having, but it would not be a good song, in my eyes, until it went through a period of sensitivity to a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song, it's just complaining."

~Joni Mitchell

I need to remind myself about this one!

paniuroczy said:

Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!

Samuel L. Jackson

No one had ever told me that whites were supposed to sing one kind of music and blacks another - I sang what I liked in the only voice I had. ~ Charley Pride

You would give up your career if you lost your voice for good, or if the impresarios stopped calling, or the audiences stopped coming. But as long as those things are there, I don't plan to stop. There is nothing that makes me feel better than to be with my public. ~ Celia Cruz

I really had little interest in becoming famous. When I write my book, it will be my guide to avoid becoming a rock star. ~ Edgar Winter

"Women have started to become lovers of each other as a result of not having enough men." ~ Usher

"Like I told somebody the other day, I'm not a situation rapper. I don't make songs." ~ Lil Wayne

It's called show business for a reason. It’s 90% business and 10% show. If you don’t know your business…you’re in trouble. ~ Johnnie Taylor

We offer insight on exactly what is involved in the industry. We represent singers and songwriters, but also producers, engineers and a whole bunch of career tracks that people can take. ~ Jimmy Jam

I think rock records tend to be very expensive. ~ Andy Summers

It's being here now that's important. There's no past and there's no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can't relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don't know if there is one. ~ George Harrison

"people will tell you were they have gone, they'll tell you where to go, but until you get there for yourself you never really know." - Joni Mitchell

"Everyones got to be different. You can't copy anybody and end up with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling. And without feeling, whatever you do amounts to nothing." - Billie Holiday

"Well. I'm probably not loving myself like I should, but I'm really trying." - Chaka Khan

"If it sounds good, it IS good." - Duke Ellington

"Anything thats not changing is not growing, and anything thats not growing is dead" - Lauryn Hill

"Some day I'm gonna call me up on the phone, so when I answer, I can tell myself to shut up." - Miles Davis

"Money won't buy you happiness, but it'll pay for the search" - Prince

MickyDolenz said:

Everything government touches turns to crap. ~ Ringo Starr

Best quote! POINT! BLANK! PERIOD!!