Quotes & Sayings About Music Festival

I have about four different endeavors I'm going after right now. They all excite me in different ways. I'm all about keeping as many irons in the fire as possible. I'm writing music, trying to write a book (aren't we all?), putting a festival together, speaking ... It keeps life interesting. — Kevin Griffin

When the fearsome foursome of rock music, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis, decided to show up in Toronto for a rock and roll festival, I knew we had to go there to try to get them all on film. — D. A. Pennebaker

Holland is a really small country, but with a very strong club and festival scene. Dance music has been huge in Holland since the late eighties. So there were a lot of opportunities for producers and DJs to release records and play live. — Afrojack

Kropp, on the other hand, is more philosophical. He reckons that all declarations of war ought to be made into a kind of festival, with entrance tickets and music, like they have at bullfights. Then the ministers and generals of the two countries would have to come into the ring, wearing boxing shorts, and armed with rubber truncheons, and have a go at each other. Whoever is left on his feet, his country is declared the winner. That would be simpler and fairer than things are out here, where the wrong people are fighting each other. — Erich Maria Remarque

Yet, there is a Chennai that hasn't changed and never will. Women still wake up at the crack of dawn and draw the kolam - the rice-flour design - outside their doorstep. Men don't consider it old-fashioned to wear a dhoti, which is usually matched with a modest pair of Bata chappals. The day still begins with coffee and lunch ends with curd rice. Girls are sent to Carnatic music classes. The music festival continues to be held in the month of December. Tamarind rice is still a delicacy - and its preparation still an art form. It's the marriage between tradition and transformation that makes Chennai unique. In a place like Delhi, you'll have to hunt for tradition. In Kolkata, you'll itch for transformation. Mumbai is only about transformation. It is Chennai alone that firmly holds its customs close to the chest, as if it were a box of priceless jewels handed down by ancestors, even as the city embraces change. — Bishwanath Ghosh

I always say that as church falls into demise, we still have the inclination to congregate whether by a night of music or a festival, or just sitting down to listen to some vinyl ... — Daniel Lanois

I love playing the CMA Music Festival each year because it's one of the very best audiences you could hope for. It's one of the places you can perform where you know everyone there is a big Country Music fan. — Trace Adkins

Obviously there is stuff that I wouldn't play in a club that I play at festivals, and vice-versa, but my sets are still dominated largely by my own music. I think that's what makes me stand out a bit. My music is also festival- and club-friendly, so it generally works out well. — Avicii

When I first saw The Black Kat Boppers I was sat on a hill at a festival and could hear this music in a tent that literally grabbed me by the lapels and dragged me in — Paul Simonon

With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city. Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. — Ursula K. Le Guin

When we were shooting in Shreveport, me and a couple of friends went down to Lafayette, because they had a big Zydeco music festival down there. We spent two days dancing to Zydeco music, eating fried alligator ... It was one of the craziest festivals I've ever been to in my life, but I loved it. — Alexander Skarsgard

I've always wanted to be a DJ so I could play the music I love for other people. That feeling hasn't changed, but my sets are always evolving. In terms of tailoring to a specific crowd, certainly I do play differently depending on the situation. It's a different feel, for example, in a small club versus a festival. — Tiesto

[I would] just stick to the festival as much as possible. Because it's about the music for me, really. [I don't come] all the way here to go to trendy parties. There are some people who come here to go to parties. [The exception is when] it's an after-party and the festival has closed. Festivals are kind of magical places, and you need to soak as much of that up as possible. — Chelsea Leyland

Whenever you take a subject you're obsessed with or that haunts you, and make a movie about it, you're converting it into work units that need to be completed. You gotta turn it into a treatment, a script, a grant application, a bunch of forms to be filled out, a shooting schedule, casting sessions, auditions, shooting, editing, music compositions, the film festival circuit, interviews even. And by the time you've finished the process you're so sick and tired by something that was once very precious to you that you're done with it. — Guy Maddin

I feel vulnerable when my ego is threatened - if I get jealous of another band's good time slot at a big festival, if I'm about to get clobbered in a political debate, if I'm trying to impress someone I have a crush on. It's the opposite of openness, letting go, allowing deep feelings to express themselves. For me, that comes from playing music and from kissing. — Greg Saunier

I decided to restore 'Napoleon' after a widescreen festival at the Odeon Leicester Square in 1968. It was run by Richard Arnell and George Dunning, who animated and directed 'Yellow Submarine,' and they'd got their hands on the last scene, the triptychs. They just showed that part, without music and with the projectors misaligned. — Kevin Brownlow

Woodstock was the antithesis of what the music industry turned into. And if anyone tries to tie another Woodstock festival to an obnoxious sponsor, I'll be out protesting again. — Michael Wadleigh

It's an honor for me to close out Mysteryland. In American music history this is hallowed ground. I think electronic music has a lot in common with the spirit of rock and roll and what Woodstock had going on at the time. We are kind of the new kids on the block and this music isn't accepted by everyone so we are still kind of getting into pop culture and I think its appropriate that this festival is here and kicking down the door. — Kaskade

I was 16 when I came to New York. I had graduated to a tenor banjo in the school jazz band, and it was kind of boring - just chords, chords, chords. Then my father took me to a mountain music and dance festival in Asheville, North Carolina, and there I saw relatively uneducated people playing great music by ear. — Pete Seeger

Standing at a Christian music festival in Asbury, Ky., in the spring of 1978, I gave my life to Jesus Christ, and that's changed everything. — Mike Pence

inside the white man rages a music festival for lumberjacks. — Christian Rudder

I'm not really into EDM music; I really like when someone plays their instrument and stuff. But I saw Deadmau5 at a festival, and it was pretty tight, I have to admit. He's got the giant mouse head on and tubes coming out of the ceiling and giant mirror glass things. — Brittany Howard

When I do a festival, I want everyone to have a party, I think it is kind of similar to a club where everyone is there to have a good time and celebrate not being at work or just being able to have fun. I love people dancing to my music as well; if I can make them dance I feel happy. — Katy B

Boys are adorable. Boys trail off their sentences in an appealing way. Boys bring a knapsack to work. Boys get haircuts from their roommate, who "totally knows how to cut hair." Boys can pack up their whole life in a duffel bag and move to Brooklyn for a gig if they need to. Boys have "gigs." Boys are broke. And when they do have money, they spend it on a trip to Colorado to see a music festival. Boys don't know how to adjust their conversation when they're talking to their friends or to your parents. They put parents on the same level as their peers and roll their eyes when your dad makes a terrible pun. Boys let your parents pay for dinner when you all go out. It's assumed. — Mindy Kaling

Oh, if I had had a friend at this moment, a friend in an attic room, dreaming by candlelight and with a violin lying ready at his hand! How I should have slipped up to him in his quiet hour, noiselessly climbing the winding stair to take him by surprise, and then with talk and music we should have held heavenly festival throughout the night! — Hermann Hesse

His life was a festival of excess that could not be contained. Deafening music, eye-popping bright colors, sugar added to almost everything he ate. Quinn's life was a bullet in a barrel ready to explode. — Neal Shusterman

Before I went on stage at Kyle Hutton's Real Life Real Music Festival, I heard one of his songwriting students, Abbey Hirvela, sing; she was in the poet's saddle and riding that horse like she owned it. She was good! I probably ruined her by showing her how to make an E chord without the 3rd though. — Ray Wylie Hubbard

What I like about Akron is that it is cool, but not too cool. We are cool enough to have street festivals all summer long, but not cool enough to have a disruptively huge music festival like South by Southwest that all the locals loathe. We are cool enough to attract young professionals and artists, but not cool enough to entice detrimental gentrification complete with skyrocketing rent prices. We — Jason Segedy

Every year when i travel around the world, i wonder if it'll be diferent, maybe one year won't come to the show or you'll be less festival, but what i realized during ARTPOP is that we belong together and some stories have no end. I will follow you around the world as long as you'll have me because i love making music, i love making art and i love, love meeting all you beautiful, creative people. — Lady Gaga

I got more publicity for not doing a festival than for doing the festival. — George Wein

Y'know, when I first started listening to punk rock music, I used to get my fucking ass kicked for it! I was known as a fucking freak! But now I'm amongst many many many freaks here with me tonight!
- Billie Joe Armstrong,Stay The Night, Reading Festival 2013 — Green Day

Splashing about in mud in the cold is not my thing. I made an attempt to go to the Isle Of Wight Festival in 1969 when Bob Dylan was playing, but we never made it. We hired a boat from Lymington, but got lost, and by the time we got there the music was over. I wasn't too sad, to be honest. — Tony Blackburn

I love the outdoor festival feeling. When I'm on stage, it's very gratifying to watch people on the lawns enjoying the music with a glass of wine. — Joshua Bell

In the late '70s I was asked to sing for the first time in Germany. I'll never forget it. It was at a festival in Bremen. The German audience went berserk and the reviews were a phenomenon. For some reason the German audience understood how technically challenging this music was; it wasn't just someone yelling their head off. — Meredith Monk

Coachella is a festival fashion show where people dress up like hippies and pretend that Passion Pit is as good as the Rolling Stones. — Caroline Kepnes

When I started out, I wanted to be the kind of artist who could play the CMA Music Festival and then turn around and play Bonnaroo, and I've managed to do both. — Kacey Musgraves

WHO'S GOT A TAMPON? I JUST GOT MY PERIOD, I will announce loudly to nobody in particular in a women's bathroom in a San Francisco restaurant, or to a co-ed dressing room of a music festival in Prague, or to the unsuspecting gatherers in a kitchen at a party in Sydney, Munich, or Cincinnati. Invariably, across the world, I have seen and heard the rustling of female hands through backpacks and purses, until the triumphant moment when a stranger fishes one out with a kind smile. No money is ever exchanged. The unspoken universal understanding is: Today, it is my turn to take the tampon. Tomorrow, it shall be yours. There is a constant, karmic tampon circle. It also exists, I've found, with Kleenex, cigarettes, and ballpoint pens. — Amanda Palmer

Each year, every city in the world that can should have a multiday festival. More people meeting each other, digging new types of music, new foods, new ideas. You want to stop having so many wars? This could be a step in the right direction. — Henry Rollins

Big Day Out is one of our favourite festivals, it's such an eclectic mix of so many different things and it's really about music - which is what a good festival should be about. The reaction from the fans in that part of the world rivals our greatest territories and the kids are always very rabid and very appreciative of us being there, so we're super excited to get back. — Mikey Way

There's nothing like a music festival. People are ready to have a good time. I don't think anyone comes to a festival going, 'I'm gonna be a complete bummer today.' — Gary Clark Jr.

For some reason, she thought of how the old people wept when they played fado music at the annual Portuguese Festival. Saudade , her great-aunt Del called it: homesick music. But according to her father, the emotion was about more than place. It was a profound longing for everything that was lost and would never be regained. — Patry Francis

At a festival, a lot of people came to see other artists, so you have to put on a signature set and performance: 'This is what I do, this is why I'm here.' At solo gigs, I'm a DJ - I'll play two-and-a-half hours, and not just my own music, also my favorite songs by other artists. — Afrojack

I met Prince William at a musical festival and he let me know he was a fan of my music. But the invitation to sing at his wedding reception came completely out of the blue. The fact that Kate and William knew the words to my songs was very touching. — Ellie Goulding

Michael Clarke Duncan and I met at a music festival that was honoring films, and we happened to be seated next to each other at the dinner, and we just hit it off and kept in touch ever since. He was just the gentle giant in real life like you would have expected him to be. — Nikki Blonsky

In itself that music festival was nothing special, these music festivals in our country are all alike, performing a most useful function especially for all those people who are chained to their labors, year in and year out, so naturally everybody comes flocking to the two or three music festivals per year, with their actual and their so-called amusements and distractions, these affairs are called music festivals because unlike the usual so-called country fairs they feature a band, an enormous attraction to the populace, that's all it is, but the organizers know that they can draw a much larger crowd by calling it a music festival rather than a country fair, so it has become the custom to call these events music festivals even if they are nothing more than country fairs, everybody attends these music festivals which usually begin early on Saturday night and end late on Sunday morning. — Thomas Bernhard

To come out here and play on Woodstock grounds, first year ever headlining on the main stage there's nothing more iconic. [Mysteryland] is one of those festivals that holds down the legacy of dance music it's been around for so many years. It's been part of what we do for so long. It kinda makes sense to bring the tradition over here to America. The festival grounds of Woodstock, that's pretty epic. — Steve Aoki

Formally, I did my studies in the sciences, but I was very conscious that I was being deprived of culture. While studying neuroscience, I was running a rock-music festival and was able to use that as a platform to explore what it takes to produce art for 20,000 inebriated 20-somethings. — Natalie Jeremijenko

I get starstruck really easily. I love music so much - it sounds so silly to say that - so if I'm playing a festival and somebody I love, like [Primal Scream's] Bobby Gillespie, is there in the backstage area, I'm like, "Wow this is amazing! There they are!" — Dee Dee Ramone

I was about 16 years old years when my father took me to a square dance festival in North Carolina. For the first time in my life, I found there was music in my country that you never heard on the radio, and you didn't hear on the juke boxes, and in theaters. I fell in love with it, especially the long-necked banjos. — Pete Seeger

I come from the heart land of New Zealand. A place where men are men and there is no such thing as a latte. Where a day's work is only done one way. THE HARD WAY. Where the vehicle you drive doesn't symbolize who you are. A place where a beer is a beer and it comes only one way, ICE COLD. Yes the great land I like to call home the Waikato but yes all this beauty comes at a price obviously where men actually act like men not knob head; makeup wearing, tight jean wearing homos there will always be a shortage of real women. So just as the last generation of real men, almost every weekend we head into every bar, club, party or music festival we can in the hopes of finding a real women. Don't get me wrong, bars clubs a music fests are the best fun ever. And I drink alcohol like it's going out of fashion not that we care about fashion round here. See you in the heart land — Daniel Anderson

There have been a lot of people involved in the growth of EDM's support in the U.S., from DJ/producers like David Guetta, Deadmau5 and Skrillex, to major festival organisers and pop artists of EDM integrating elements of dance music into their music. — Tiesto

Joan of Arc is my namesake. I played her character while still in my teens, at a music festival held at the University of Colorado in Boulder. — Joan Van Ark

I owe my discovery of the Hot Club of Cowtown to Kinky Friedman, leader of the Texas Jewboys. When I saw that Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys were headlining the 2003 Santa Clarita Cowboy Poetry and Music Festival, I thought it my duty to check out the band that had inspired the Texas Jewboys. — Clive Sinclair

There was gray train smoke over the town most days, it smelled of travel, of transcontinental trains about to flash by, of important things about to happen. The train smell sounded the 'A' for Lamptown and then a treble chord of frying hamburger and onions and boiling coffee was struck by Hermann Bauer's kitchen, with a sostenuto of stale beer from Delaney's back door. These were all busy smells and seemed a 6 to 6 smell, a working town's smell, to be exchanged at the last factory whistle for the festival night odors of popcorn, Spearmint chewing gum, barber-shop pomades, and the faint smell of far-off damp cloverfields. Mornings the cloverfields retreated when the first Columbus local roared through the town. Bauer's coffee pot boiled over again, and the factory's night watchmen filed into Delaney's for their morning beer. — Dawn Powell

Alan Paul plunges into Chinese life and takes us along for the ride, through vegetable markets, used-car lots, Taoist temples, divey bars, and a beachside music festival before thousands of cheering fans. He conveys the thrills and challenges of living abroad, the confusions and regrets, and most of all the opportunity to become the person we always hoped to be. — Peter Hessler

The Boston Globe: The Woodstock Music and Art Festival will surely go down in history as a mass event of great and positive significance in the life of the country ... That this many young people could assemble so peaceably and with such good humor in a mile-square area ... speaks volumes about their dedication to the ideal of respect for the dignity of the individual ... In a nation beset with a crescendo of violence, this is a vibrantly hopeful sign. If violence is infectious, so, happily, is nonviolence. — Michael Lang