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Quote by Phil Collins

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Phil Collins
Phil Collins

Phil Collins (born January 30, 1951) is a renowned English musician, singer, songwriter, drummer, and record producer. He gained fame as the drummer and lead vocalist of the progressive rock band Genesis and achieved massive success as a solo artist. Known for his distinctive voice and emotionally charged performances, Collins' music spans pop, rock, soul, and adult contemporary. His iconic hits include 'In the Air Tonight,' 'Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now),' and 'Another Day in Paradise.' With over 100 million records sold worldwide, he has won multiple Grammy Awards, Brit Awards, and an Academy Award nomination. Collins is considered one of the most influential musicians of the 1980s and 1990s. more

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“I started with the chorus of that song, kind of like a fun bouncy thing to play, and then one of the lines popped up: 'I got things to do today, people to see, things to say.' I wrote about a dozen verses for it, but no song needs to be that long unless you're Bob Dylan. So when we recorded it I started to tear it down to some of the lines I thought were the funniest.”

“What inspires me is anxiety and the quest to try to change things in my life. ...I got addicted to endings and beginnings and to the idea of always moving around. ...Obviously, whenever you're going through something that's the best time to create, if you're going through something amazing, or horrible, or nothing at all you should be creating. Unfortunately the songwriters of today generally torture themselves to make sure they're writing good songs and take it a little too seriously.”

“There really are two different schools of songwriting-American and Canadian. It's interesting. You guys have this history of guys like Paul Williams and Jimmy Webb, and they're different than Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. All those weird voices come out of Canada. That's because it's so cold here we can hardly open our mouth. We get much less light in Canada. No wonder the writing's dark.”

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