American Musician Quotes

If I had possession over judgment day
Lord the woman I'm loving
Wouldn't have no right to pray.

I can't help missing Stokowski. The musician in me thinks of how great Stokowski could make an orchestra sound and wonders if we'll ever ever see another conductor like him.

In New Orleans you're born into music and you die into music and music all in between.

Through the dark days of legalized segregation and on into the civil rights era, jazz shone as a beacon for achieving interracial respect and understanding. It seemed as if the dream of a color-blind society was within reach in the jazz world, where musicians were judged on merit and not skin color.

What are words worth?
Words in papers
Words in books
Words on TV
Words are crooks
Words of comfort
Words of peace
Words to make the fighting cease
Words to tell you what to do
Words are working hard for you.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

Ornette Coleman

I didn't quit that band because I wanted to. I quit that band because I had to. Because when people give you an ultimatum about your family, what are you going to do? But the problem was no one was being truthful at the time.

The bare necessities, the simple bare necessities
Forget about your worries and your strife.

We never made plans. Well, we made plans, but they went awry. It was good to have a plan in case they didn't go awry.

Hype. What a marvellous, misused word. If you hype something and it succeeds, you're a genius, it wasn't hype; if you hype it and it fails, then it's just a hype.

As soon as it was understood that we could handle things in our own way, it was the thrill of my life to walk out on that stage with people just hemming the band in.

Here's me opening my wrists before breakfast, Christmas day, and here's you asking if it hurt. Here's where I choose between mea culpa and Why the hell should I tell you?

Michael Donaghy

A piece of art is not a loaf of bread. When someone steals a loaf of bread from the store, that's it. The loaf of bread is gone. When someone downloads a piece of music, it's just data until the listener puts that music back together with their own ears, their mind, their subjective experience. How they perceive your work changes your work.

I should know who I am by now.
I walk the record stands somehow.
Thinking of winter.
Your name is the splinter inside me.
While I wait.

I love, I love, I love, killer whales, and I love mangos, and Iggy Pop too, I love Iggy Pop, and eating, getting up in the morning, and going swimming, and taking a good shit, and I love all of you too! I love John Frusciante who's back in the band. Who loved Dave Navarro?(boos)That's what I thought!

A fat pink cloud hangs over the hill Unfolding like a rose. If you hold my hand and sit real still You can hear the grass as it grows.

John La Touche (lyricist)

A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous. Got me?

Captain Beefheart

I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate,
She shivers like the jelly on a plate.

Armand J. Piron

We bring more than a paycheck
to our loved ones and family.
We bring home asbestosis, silicosis,
brown lung, black lung disease.
And radiation hits the children
before they've even been conceived.

Ysaye Maria Barnwell

The mind is led on, step by step, to defeat its own logic.

Old churches must not simply stand as monuments to the past but as spiritual grandparents that have invested in the future by passing on their life to others and releasing their offspring to form new congregations. Church planting needs to be given priority by old-line denominations.

Oh the moonlight's fair tonight along the Wabash.
From the fields there comes the breath of new-mown hay;
Thro' the sycamores the candle lights are gleaming,
On the banks of the Wabash far away.

I was lucky enough to write songs that carry a good beat and tell a real story that people could feel was their story, too — something that old people or the kids could both enjoy.

Antoine Fats Domino, Jr.

Oh, dem golden slippers!
Oh, dem golden slippers!
Golden slippers I'm gwinter to wear,
To walk the golden streets.

Off we go into the wild blue yonder,
Climbing high into the sun.

Robert MacArthur Crawford