Quotessence
Home / Topics / Listening Quotes

Listening Quotes

Browse 4050 quotes about Listening.

Related topics

Listening Quotes

“I think people take Blink-128 more seriously now than they did before. And it's largely our fault because we called our records Enema of the State and Take Off Your Pants and Jacket. We were always kind of the underdogs, especially critically. People wrote us off as this joke band. But the people who listened to Blink knew that we were silly and whatever, but we wrote songs about divorce and suicide and depression. Those kids that were listening to Blink are now the ones that control all these outlets that used to just write us off.”

“When that much time goes by, you're really listening to your old music differently. At the time it's written, it was the beginning of our career and with every song we're thinking, 'This is what's creating us.' Now, nothing is creating us. We're well-created. We're there. It becomes just pure pleasure and you become sort of an archeologist of your own music. You don't judge it, because what's the point? It's a 30-year-old song. It just becomes fun.”

“It's a really common trap to want your life to live up to some standard that you believe in, and then you start to really examine those standards and realize they come not from experiences you've had, but things you've seen in movies, or feelings you've felt listening to pop songs, or ideas you've received from reading books. And not just happy things, but a lot of the time, sad things. It gets kind of depressing, when you see how movies and songs make these promises to us.”

“The fun part, I will admit this much, there is a period when listening to my music is fun, and that's when I'm making it. There's a tiny little window before something gets old, but after it's come to fruition. There's a little window there where I can listen to a song probably about five times, and I'll really think it's awesome. That's kind of the period that lets me know when I - 99 percent of the time, that period is right about whether a song is going to be a keeper for an album or just a throwaway track that never gets - in that little window.”

“To get large groups of people to dance, there needs to be something accessible about the music. The beat can't be too esoteric, but unless we're talking about prog or etherealist composition, I think there's something simplistic about most music. What's completely insane to me is that people would consider music that's simple to be dumbed-down. Couldn't simplicity be a deliberate, smart choice? Those people aren't really listening; they're judging a song off of a beat, off of a pulse.”

“I would go into my three different sisters' rooms in the early-mid '70s and they had very specific different tastes in music. I specifically remember lying on my different sisters' bedroom floors and listening to their record collections. And "Starship Trooper" was one of my sister Nancy's favorite songs and favorite album. Music is so defining for me. In the late '70s and early '80s, I worked in radio. When I was in high school, I worked at two different radio stations.”

“I would agree with that. But when I write lyrics, personally I don't care if the person who is listening to it understands what I'm saying or not; and I write them like that specifically. You know, I have my views; I don't feel the need to have people have the same views as me. So if they find the meaning in the songs and it's the same meaning as the one I intended then fine and dandy and if they don't, they don't.”

“I don't really have a set-in-stone process or formula. Sometimes the melody is there and I have to chase down the lyrics. Sometimes, the song is there and I have to make the melody fit. What I've learned so far about songwriting is that I can't force a song. If I try to do that, it's hollow, and people know a hollow song when they hear it. It's the song they stop listening to and forget about. I'd prefer not to write those kinds of songs.”

“Years later, you can hear a song, and it brings you back right to that moment, what was happening at that time, whether it was a relationship or a difficult time, or maybe a great time in your life, and you had that album you were listening to. Twenty years later, you can put on that song you fell in love to or your heart was broken to, and you hear that song and it brings you right back there. I think music is the most powerful tool we have.”

“Way back in the day, when I first started and had delusions of adequacy as a cartoonist, I would listen to music. When I switched to a career as a writer, I would try to listen to music, but if the songs had lyrics they would get in the way of the words I was trying to write. So I switched to listening to purely instrumental pieces.”

“I grew up listening to a lot of player-piano music in my house and a lot of old Tin Pan Alley songs and American standards. My dad listened to a lot of traditional Irish music and I grew up doing musical theater. So most of the music I was exposed to as a kid was pre-rock n' roll.”

“People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.”