Motley never once sat down and said, 'Well, the music scene's changing. We need to make this record a little darker or heavier musically or lyrically.' It was just four guys sitting in a room like a bunch of 16-year-olds in a garage and jamming on riffs.
The way I feel about music is that there is no right and wrong. Only true and false.
A right balance between music and lyrics is important. Music complements lyrics.
Whenever I'm writing a script, I'm scoring myself by playing the right kind of music.
I fell into music, but I just needed to find the right moment to jump into acting.
The problem is that music is selfish in that you need to make it for yourself, so that you can give it away, and those two things don't jive. I needed to find the right reason to play that had the magic and mystery and excitement that made me want to play in the first place.
If you play music for the right reasons, the rest of the things will come. The right reason to play music is that you love it. That's why I play music. I never imagined that I was going to be doing this, especially because I never thought of myself as an instrumentalist.
If you're making music for all the right reasons, people are going to be receptive to that and appreciate it the same way you did when your were writing it.
It may be that that we can sing what we often cannot say, whether it be from shyness, fear, lack of the right words or the passion or dramatic gift to express them. More souls have rallied to more causes by the strains of music than by straining rhetoric.
To me there is no picture so beautiful as smiling, bright-eyed, happy children; no music so sweet as their clear and ringing laughter.
Ringo is one of the world's true humans. The only one out those four guys, who did not have an agenda. Ringo was just into the music.
I used to skate around the rink with my mom, and we used to race each other until I started getting way better. Then she hung up her skates and resorted to playing my music at the rink.
The people who were learning from me tended to be more commercial performers who were gonna rip off the salient idea to do it in a way that will sell, but they weren't going for the music.
I had no problem with Ritchie. Ritchie and I never argued. We never had a problem. I think I was always able to write the things that he wanted - until he decided he wanted to be a pop star. And then he started doing pop music. And once he did that, that was the end for me.
When I was in Utah there, first learning the kind of music I love, my favorite singer was T. Texas Tyler. So my friend, Norman Ritchie, the traveling teenage sage, started calling me U. Utah Phillips.
There's a tacit belief that actors shouldn't write books, they're sort of allowed to direct movies but there will be a lot of skepticism, and they shouldn't do artwork or music. There are these invisible roadblocks to gain entree to these areas for actors, and you kind of have to crash through those invisible barriers.
I always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.
Rock and roll music, if you like it, if you feel it, you can't help but move to it. That's what happens to me. I can't help it.'
You literally cannot deny the fact that rock and roll was born because of blues, and blues is black man's music.
I don't have no favorite rock bands. I'm a fan of rock music, though.
