Quotes & Sayings About Metal Rock

Of the myriad impressive notables related to Dio's passing, perhaps foremost is the fact the man was 67 years old and was still making quality hard rock records, still touring with a new (old) version of Black Sabbath, still singing his absolute heart out about dragons and rainbows, making the infamous devil horns hand gesture he swiped from his Italian grandmother and which has since became the universal, undeniable, completely badass symbol for true metal across all galaxies everywhere, and for which Dio deserves to be ensconced in the heavens forevermore. — Mark Morford

I was ten when I heard the music that ended the first phase of my life and cast me hurtling into a new horizon. Drenched to the skin, I stood on Dunoon's pier peering seawards through diagonal rain, looking for the ferry that would take me home. There, on the everwet west coast of Scotland, I heard it: like sonic scalpels, the sounds of electric guitars sliced through the dreich weather. My body hairs pricked up, each one a willing receiver for the Thunder-God grooves. To my young ears, the sound of these amplified guitars was angelic (although, with hindsight, I don't suppose angels play Gibson guitars at ear-bleeding volume). A voice that suggested vocal chords of polished silver soared alongside razor-sharp overdriven riffs. I knew that I was hearing the future. — Mark Rice

seen Sitterson knew what was happening: in the mechanism older than Man, a small metal hammer struck a glass vial, cracking it from top to bottom and releasing the blood retained inside. The blood ran into a brass funnel that extended into a long, long pipe, running even deeper through rock and dark spaces, emerging eventually into a place deeper still. Here, the — Tim Lebbon

I like whatever's good. Metal, rock, new or old - I don't care, as long as it does something to my brain. — Chris Reifert

Although my music is electronic, it has a lot of influences from my past, which is all sorts of genres; I've been in a rock-metal band for a long time, and I still feel like, personally, I have a lot of influence from that. My classical influence, you can find spots here and there. — Zedd

You can go to any small town in America, there's going to be a metal fan there. You can't say that about post-rock. — David Pajo

RJD was pretty much heavy metal personified, a tiny 5-foot-4-inch sorcerer with a mangy mane, demonic eyes and sly grin, all coupled to a simply huge, operatic voice, a diminutive powerhouse who prowled the stage like a feline elf and who was, it turns out, also finely intelligent and well spoken, an actual gentleman in a genre known all too well for its bombastic, monosyllabic doltbuckets. A rare thing indeed. — Mark Morford

I was in a rock band; I was my own folk singer; I was in a death metal band for a very short time; I was in a cover band, a jazz band, a blues band. I was in a gospel choir. — Kiesza

Metal is from the earth, he thought as he scrutinized. From below: from that realm which is the lowest, the most dense. Land of trolls and caves, dank, always dark. Yin world, in its most melancholy aspect. World of corpses, decay and collapse. Of feces. All that has died, slipping and disintegrating back down layer by layer. The daemonic world of the immutable; the time-that-was.
And yet, in the sunlight, the silver triangle glittered. It reflected light. Fire, Mr. Tagomi thought. Not dank or dark object at all. Not heavy, weary, but pulsing with life. The high realm, aspect of yang: empyrean, ethereal. As befits work of art. Yes, that is artist's job: takes mineral rock from dark silent earth transforms it into shining light-reflecting form from sky.
Has brought the dead to life. Corpse turned to fiery display; the past had yielded to the future. — Philip K. Dick

Things began to go wrong when I was seventeen. My band's twenty-year-old lead guitarist earned seven years in jail for a drug-fuelled spree of violence. The other band members were quick to let go of their musical dreams, but I never did. They did the 'mature' thing: after writing off the band as a teenage fantasy, they got real jobs and made some money. They called it growing up. I called it giving up. — Mark Rice

The Rolling Stones are truly the greatest rock and roll band in the world and always will be. The last too. Everything that came after them, metal, rap, punk, new wave, pop-rock, you name it ... you can trace it all back to the Rolling Stones. They were the first and the last and no one's ever done it better. — Bob Dylan

The power chords in 'Come Sail Away' were super heavy to me as a kid. Metal? No. Hard rock? At times, for sure. — Eddie Trunk

I don't listen to hard rock or heavy metal. I suppose I've always been influenced by folk music, I'm a big Bob Dylan fan. — Roger Glover

I was into alternative stuff, but I was also open to a little bit of hard rock and metal, like Guns N' Roses, Metallica. — Girl Talk

She's the quiet type who's into heavy metal. — Billy Joel

Aren't all the best songs about a girl? It doesn't matter if it's metal, if it's country, if it's blues or rock and roll; all the songs that make us remember and make us want to sing along are about the best kind of girl, the kind you can't live without but can't ever get ahold of. — Jay Crownover

The music was loud but mellow. It was a mix-tape of ballads but by heavy metal artists. All the songs said the same thing: it's okay to take a three-minute break from fighting and fucking and drinking; love your girlfriend and be sad; unclench your fist and hold someone until it's time to rock again. — Dave Newman

Hopefully people can look at our band and see that we're a heavy rock band. We're definitely not a metal band, but we're a band that focuses on meaningful lyrics and melody. — Adam Rich

I've always said that there's a huge progressive rock, progressive metal audience out there, in the world. — John Petrucci

At the apex of Prince's career, I listened almost exclusively to metal. My sister actually purchased 'Purple Rain' on cassette, which I write about in my anthology ["Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas"]. And I felt ashamed that I liked Prince so much. A typical rock fan would be embarrassed that they liked Warrant or Ratt at the time, but I had the exact opposite experience. And I had this overwhelming fear that Prince was actually a better guitar player than any of the metal gods. — Chuck Klosterman

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a joke - the fact that Madonna is in before Rush and Kiss. Those two bands have influenced so many groups and people other than in metal. — Corey Taylor

The fact of the matter is that when I drink, I am 100 percent certifiably insane. Hopelessly, utterly, undeniably bat shit crazy. I do things that are abhorrent to me; anathema to my nature, my morals, and my upbringing. And once I start, I cannot stop the craziness. It just spirals on and on, ever downward, until I die or hit rock bottom. And even at rock bottom, despite all evidence that I should stop, I will grab a cold beer and a pick ax and keep digging deeper. It's insane. The only way I know to not be crazy is just not to drink. — D. Randall Blythe

A missive to all you metal bands, the world is totally over the rock thing. Rock is deader than it's ever been. — Billy Corgan

It's really an orchestral piece featuring a group and it was quite revolutionary at the time and it in fact, it kicked Deep Purple off as a name in Great Britain because it made all the newspapers. Everyone was writing about us. And there was some confusion as to what kind of band we were after that, which is why Deep Purple in Rock is such a hard unbending album of really furious hard heavy rock. Heavy metal hadn't been invented at that point. — Roger Glover

Barry White, Smokey Robinson and Curtis Mayfield are big influences for me. But I'm also a metal head. I was in a bunch of punk rock bands. The Bee Gees, hip-hop and the Beach Boys are just as much of an influence on me as Smokey. — Mayer Hawthorne

Anytime rock and metal can get on mainstream TV at all, it's a good thing. — Eddie Trunk

Punk rock and metal has always been a home to me, it's where I cut my teeth; and those are the friends that I have, and the bands that I love. — John Dyer Baizley

If one could know whether among that glittering host there were here and there other spirit-inhabited grains of rock and metal, whether man's blundering search for wisdom and for love was a sole and insignificant tremor, or part of a universal movement! — Olaf Stapledon

Heavy metal drives me bonkers, it makes me want to vomit, heavy metal really is a pile of puke. — Ian Gillan

A lot of people are surprised by my love of heavy metal. I fell in love with heavy metal almost before any other genre. One of the first concerts I went to was a Donnington Monsters Of Rock concert. — Jamie Cullum

I do think I have a rebellious, metal-loving rock chick inside of me. — Kesha

When I get 13 or 14 years old, I get crazy with rock music, like, like, deeply crazy. And one of my favorite bands at that moment was, for example, like - bands like Metallica or Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd and Santana, you know? And then I start to play metal, actually, when I was - at the age of 15. — Juanes

Warlock: Four thousand and fifty-three metric tons of inert rock, metal and organic matter, frozen solid.
Quasar: Frozen in what?
Drax: Time.
Quasar: "Time", Drax?
Drax: Uh-huh. Old, old frozen time.
Quasar: Right. And that tastes like what?
Drax: Regret. — Dan Abnett

In the late 80s though, during the new Glam Rock, leather trousers came back with a vengeance. In a way they replaced Spandex, which had slipped slowly out of fashion due to bands like Saxon never being out of the stuff. These new leather trousers began to develop accessories such as tassels, sequins, and laces up the sides. This all looked quite nice for a while, but in the end they were just another easy target for Kurt Cobain and his subversive cardigans. — Seb Hunter

If it comes out sounding like Dixieland jazz or classical or punk or rock or even slightly metal, that's because that's where I'm going to find inspiration. — Ben Harper

I love punk rock, but I also love metal. — Penelope Spheeris

Activision was promoting an adventure game called Pitfall Harry and had built a little jungle scene in which passersby could swing on a makeshift vine. In another room, a company called Zombie had a metal sphere that shot blue electric bolts through the air. But the id installation had a bit more in store: an eight-foot-tall vagina. Gwar, the scatological rock band that id had hired to produce the display, had pushed their renowned prurient theatrics to the edge. The vagina was lined with dozens of dildos to look like teeth. A bust of O. J. Simpson's decapitated head hung from the top. As the visitors walked through the vaginal mouth, two members of Gwar cloaked in fur and raw steak came leaping out of the shadows and pretended to attack them with rubber penises. The Microsoft executives were frozen. Then, to everyone's relief, they burst out laughing. — David Kushner

I guess that I'm primarily thought of as a rocker, largely because of 'Frankenstein' being such a heavy song - you know, it was really hard rock, almost a precursor of heavy metal and just the image of the synthesizer. I happened to be the first guy to get the idea of putting a strap on the keyboard. — Edgar Winter

I think the idea of crossing over is the ultimate expression of being ... Maybe it's time to play rock and roll on disco ... maybe it's time to play heavy metal on R & B, things like that. Certainly culminating on things like Aerosmith doing the rap thing with Run DMC, which if they hadn't done that, or if Eddie hadn't played with Michael Jackson, or if I hadn't done "Hot Stuff", people would have said "You can't do that" — Jeff Baxter

I didn't want to live in LA again, although I'd go back every couple of months to do an interview, usually with a heavy rock or metal band. And as the decade went on, so much of that scene had become totally corrupted by too much coke and money and silicone. — Sylvie Simmons

The freak show was about to begin.

Spotlights flooded the musicians powered by solar panels near a massive amplifier. The guitarist continued playing and the others joined in, playing a raucous crossover between hard rock and heavy metal. The one with long blond hair grabbed hold of the microphone and belted out a shattering cry that sounded like a call to battle. The crowd went pin drop silent to listen and then cheered in unison as the band played on. The front man sang piercing growls and low croons about the Knights in Stone, the protectors of the ancient forests, battling against the evil tree witches... Kayla's coven. — Lisa Carlisle

I've played death metal, punk rock, hardcore, funk ... I've done it all. And all there really is music and at the end of the day, anybody who has a record and puts out a record that's basically the same song 13 times over on one record; to me they're just cheating the fans. — Cristian Machado

Bon Jovi's trick is to use heavy-metal chords and still sound absolutely safe. Rock & roll used to be rebellion disguised as commercialism; now so much of it is commercialism disguised as rebellion. — Michael Azerrad

Just a rock, a dome of snow, the deep blue sky, and a hunk of orange-painted metal from which a shredded American flag cracked in the wind. Nothing more. Except two tiny figures walking together those last few feet to the top of the Earth. — Tom Hornbein

I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars. — Olaf Stapledon

The Apollo pictures of the whole Earth conveyed to multitudes something well known to astronomers: On the scale of the worlds - to say nothing of stars or galaxies - humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal — Carl Sagan

Nature is unselfish," she says. "It only wishes to survive. Humanity inflicts harm on it, digs up the earth, poisons the waters, harnesses rock and metal and stone for its own purposes. We are the protectors. We are the connection between humanity and nature. Nature is always searching for balance. — Amy Ewing

The greatest minds and the most advanced engineering went into its creation. They carved the prison out of solid rock from the face of the
mountains just north of the lake. They sealed it not only with metal, stone, and wood but also with ancient and powerful enchantments. In the end, when it was finished, it was believed to be the most secure prison in the world."
"They must have had some really nasty criminals back then to go to so much trouble," Hadrian said.
"No," Myron replied matter-of-factly, "just one."
"One?" Alric asked. "An entire prison designed to hold just one man?"
"His name was Esrahaddon. — Michael J. Sullivan

It is, we wanted to make a record that reflected our love of Hard-Rock music and it is sort of Metal though we don't really describe ourselves as Metal. — Adam Rich

Thousands of cars and a million guitars
Screaming with power in the air!
We've found the place where the decibels race
This army of rock will be there
To ram it down
Ram it down!
Straight to the heart of this town.
Ram it down.
Ram it down.
Razing the place to the ground,
Ram it down! — Rob Halford

On the scale of worlds - to say nothing of stars or galaxies - humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal. It — Carl Sagan

I've had the privilege of meeting and/or interviewing most of the top metal and hard rock artists at various points in my career and sharing their stories and music with millions of fans on air through TV and radio. — Eddie Trunk

My favorite type of music to sing and to listen to, you know, rock. It's not always metal, but you know, half the time it is. Metal's cool, you know? Not everybody on 'American Idol' listens to metal. — James Durbin

I'm a member of the Recording Academy and I see the way it works and even with the whole voting process it's broken down into specific categories. There are Pop categories and Dance and Rock and Metal and Film and Score and everything else. Basically when you are voting you are urged not to vote in the category that you don't know anything about. — John Petrucci

I enjoy everything. I actually do listen to everything. In high school, I listened to a lot of metal and punk rock. — Tim Schafer

If I've got a Dad, and his name is Wormwood Rot, and he's in some heavy metal rock band called Grave Dirt ... then I'm definitely meeting him!
She stares at me awkwardly, and I'm about to ask again - maybe even insist - when she says, Honey, why do you think he's on the news? Wormwood, I mean ... your father? Becca, he's ... dead. — Rusty Fischer

As I rock down the hall I am flung from my path- snatched and grabbed. Before I can even utter a word, a large palm is covering my mouth. In less than five seconds I am inside a pitch black room, pushed face first into a cold metal door, and I hear the lock snick into place. A heavy weight presses at my back. I didn't even have time to panic. It was a well-timed attack.
My mind flashes to another time and place, another hand on my mouth. I breathe though the panic that tries to overcome me.
I allow my senses to put me at ease. He's just softly breathing near my ear. His body is relaxed. The way he holds me feels more playful than threatening.
"Let me guess ... the Boss," I say to the heavy weight at my back. My tone is a mix of amused annoyance. — Erica Chilson

Affectors Harmagedon is a solid blast of PROG metal complete with burning solos, odd time signatures, orchestral highlights, and Rock riffs that will tear your head off! Excited that I could be a part of this album! — Jordan Rudess

Hard rock for me is AC/DC, Def Leppard, Tesla, Kiss. Metal tends to be louder, ruder, darker, like Judas Priest, Slayer, Iron Maiden. — Eddie Trunk

Long ago, when an early galaxy began to pour light out into the surrounding darkness, no witness could have known that billions of years later some remote clumps of rock and metal, ice and organic molecules would fall together to make place called Earth; or that life would arise and thinking beings evolve who would one day capture a little of that galactic light, and try to puzzle out what had sent it on its way. And after the earth dies, some 5 billion years from now, after it's burned to a crisp, or even swallowed by the Sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being
and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth. — Carl Sagan

One thing people would be surprised about is that although hard rock and heavy metal are without question 90% of what I listen to and my passion, there are other things I enjoy. My first ever favorite band in my life before KISS was a power-pop band called The Raspberries. — Eddie Trunk

I listen to tons of hard rock and metal, like Iron Maiden, Motorhead, etc., but I also listen to Beethoven and Mozart, to Discharge and the Bad Brains, and to Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington. So I think there's merit to both the melodic punk and to the hardcore stuff too. — Dave Smalley

I've always seen this overlap between medieval warfare and heavy metal. You see heavy metal singers and they'll have like a brace around their arm and they'll be singing about Orcs. So let's just make a world where that all happens. That all gets put together, the heavy metal, and the rock, and the battling, actually does happen. Let's not flirt around with this let's just do it. — Tim Schafer

Punk rock really influenced me, the basic metal bands, Zeppelin, Stones and Floyd, and Southern rock bands. I think I was pretty well-rounded. — Al Jourgensen

Never go to clubs with metal detectors. Sure it feels safe inside. But what about all those niggas waiting outside with guns? They know you ain't got one. — Chris Rock

All that stuff about heavy metal and hard rock, I don't subscribe to any of that. It's all just music. I mean, the heavy metal from the Seventies sounds nothing like the stuff from the Eighties, and that sounds nothing like the stuff from the Nineties. Who's to say what is and isn't a certain type of music? — Ozzy Osbourne

At 15, I started listening to hard rock and heavy metal, but I would say it was more hard rock because I liked Kiss, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, and eventually AC/DC. — Rick Rubin

I write almost all my songs on an acoustic guitar, even if they turn into rock songs, hard rock songs, metal songs, heavy metal songs, really heavy songs ... I love writing on an acoustic because I can hear what every string is doing; the vibrations haven't been combined in a collision of distortion or effects yet. — Corey Taylor

She'd heard of black American Express cards before, because famous people had them, and now she was holding one with her name on it. The card was cool against her skin, like it was made out of metal instead of plastic, and it was thick and heavy, so it didn't bend like a normal credit card. Would it even slide through a swipe machine? She hit it against her palm, surprised by the echo of the metal. Rock-solid, it felt indestructible. — Michelle Madow

I like to use two basic elements for my clothing: rock ... you know, metal and chains and stuff - mixed with fairies and drama and Victorian clothing - fantasy. — Evanescence

So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky. — Russell Baker

I mean something dirty, sweaty," Luiz corrected idly, leaning closer. He stroked the back of his knuckles down Michael's cheek. "What I like best. Rock, blues, with an edge of metal. Something dangerous. Real. The audience driven to ... well, in the old days it would have been bloodlust. But these are more temperate times. So lust will have to do. — Jae T. Jaggart

I mean there's certainly a lot of progressive rock and metal that exists at the underground level, which has its own vitality, as it should. But it seems to have lost its ability to really charge up the hill. — Billy Corgan

We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way Galaxy which is one of billions of other galaxies which make up a universe which may be one of a very large number, perhaps an infinite number, of other universes. That is a perspective on human life and our culture that is well worth pondering. — Carl Sagan

It seems like the powers that be are really trying to separate everything and really divide the genres and divide the trends. If you're metal and you don't sound like Slayer would sound now, then you're not metal. If you're punk rock and you don't sound like and preach about what The Sex Pistols would have preached about back in the day, then you're not really punk rock. — Cristian Machado

We fine-tune our moods with pharmaceuticals and classic rock. Craft our meals around our allergies and ideologies. Customize our bodies with cross training, with ink and metal, with surgery and wearable technologies. We can choose a vehicle to express our hipness or hostility. We can move to a neighborhood that matches our social values, find a news outlet that mirrors our politics, create a social network that "likes" everything we say or post. With each transaction and upgrade, each choice and click, life moves closer to us, and the world becomes our world. — Paul Roberts

We have a rock audience, classical audience, metal, pop - everything. We unite them all. — Stjepan Hauser

The only planet we are sure is inhabited is a tiny speck of rock and metal, shining feebly by reflected sunlight, and at this distance utterly lost. — Carl Sagan

I feel like the rap metal at the end of the 1990s destroyed rock music for everybody and suddenly everybody felt like they had to apologise for being in rock bands. People suddenly felt bad about wanting to reach massive audiences and the sense of theatre, that we have in our live show, became something to avoid. — Nate Ruess

I've got my own studio, and I've got four- to five-hundred unreleased tracks. I've got stuff that's electronic, orchestral, jazz, I've got rock, I've got metal, you know, I don't have polka. — Serj Tankian

The Devil has all the best tunes? My arse! Metalville just got a new sheriff. — Mark Rice

I was in punk rock bands, heavy metal bands, world music bands, jazz groups, any type of music that would take me. I just love music. — Reggie Watts

Well, when you're being held at gunpoint by a geriatric madman in a metal skirt, you've kind of hit rock bottom anyway. It can't really get much worse. — Jonathan Stroud

Metal is made up of many silly cliches, and Dio's songs rarely shied away from a good cheeseball lyric about medieval knights and crystal balls. But the amazing thing is, Dio the man never succumbed to the typical ravages of drugs, booze or hideous all-body tattoos. He never gained 75 pounds later in life or lost most of his voice through merciless shredding and ended it all playing county fairs for 19 drunk dudes in a barn before collapsing in a heap in a motel room in Jersey. There's a lesson in there somewhere. Or everywhere. — Mark Morford

I have truly eclectic taste in music, and I seem to cycle through phases in terms of to what's inspiring me. I'll go from Beethoven to Sigur Ros; world music, Brit-pop, classic rock, blues/jazz, even the odd bit of heavy metal. — Rachel Miner

That's what I love from metal, and that's what I love from hip-hop. That's what I love from any music that's hard, that's got an edge to it-The attitude in it. — Kid Rock

We've always said we're a HEAVY METAL band. We've kinda branched out here and there - we've done a rap thing, we've done a rap-rock thing, we've done something with Angelo Belmonte, who's the primary composer of Twin Peaks. In fact, most of David Lynch's movies is Angelo. He did something with us and that was great. We've also acted, we've done an episode in Married with Children, which was awesome - so we're always looking to do things which you wouldn't expect. — Charlie Benante

I pulled the Net chip out of my head, cutting her off. The chip was long and white, with many metal legs; cupped in my hand, it looked like some pale, crawling thing that you'd find living under a rock. Vermin. — Raphael Carter

I like hard rock, and classic rock, and even metal. — Frances McDormand

Heavy metal is a universal energy
it's the sound of a volcano. It's rock, it's earth shattering. Somewhere in our primal being we understand. — Billy Corgan

Ronnie James Dio died the other day, quietly succumbed to a relatively sudden onset of stomach cancer and up and left the planet in a blaze of stage fire, dragonsmoke and general metal awesomeness. Maybe you heard. — Mark Morford

Only two to three per cent of an audience is interested in words and pays attention to lyrics; most of the rest of it is about image or the beat or the sound, or else it's a tribal thing - country & western, rap, heavy metal, with historical folk rock off in some kind of cult. — Al Stewart

I don't exactly fit well in leather pants, so I don't rock that look. I lost my hair a long time ago, so no hair-metal look, either. I had hair down to my belly button at one point, but I think that was the '90s. — Brian Posehn

Take a ride on heavy metal, it's the only way that you can travel down that road. — Don Felder

I'm primarily thought of as a rocker, and certainly 'Frankenstein' had a very dramatic power rock image. It was almost a precursor of heavy metal and fusion. But I also love jazz and classical and if there's one common thread that runs through all my music, it is blues. — Edgar Winter

Deep Purple definitely belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. 'Cause they had great songs, great musicianship, they had an impact, and they're a huge influence on the heavy metal community as a whole. — Kirk Hammett

I don't only like rock music. There are other forms of music that I find interesting. I would want to do everything, every kind of music. I wouldn't want to be limited to like playing heavy metal or whatever. — Mick Jagger

In the long-run I think we lost some of our audience because of noise. I don't think people were ready for it, OK? And after we did it nothing really happened, but then 4-5 years later when there was a rap-rock emergence, we were already over it. We could have made Bring the Noise part 2, Bring the Noise part 3 - but like I said we're a METAL band, we didn't want to do that. — Charlie Benante