Music Influences Quotes & Sayings

I wasn't allowed to listen to a lot of music growing up. It wasn't until I started to make my gospel record when I was around 14 or 15 that I started to be exposed to more outside influences. — Katy Perry

The jazz guitarist Peter Sprague calls his home recording studio SpragueLand, but sometimes it seems that the moniker better captures the way he has turned the entire southland into his own musical playground. Sprague is a highly versatile musician who draws on the wellsprings of jazz and Brazilian music as primary influences. — Andrew S. Gilbert

I was going to go to college and graduate and move to New York and do the Broadway thing. That's where a lot of my influences vocally and writing come from. Then I did some covers, and towards the end of college, I saw it was a path I could take. I wrote more pop music. — Sam Tsui

My influences in this world have always been Crazy Horse and Malcolm X, my overall influences. But I was influenced by rock n' roll, blues, and country music. I was influenced by singers. — John Trudell

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

Avenues - television, magazines, movies, music, friends, malls, and catalogs, to name a few. A steady diet of these worldly influences will shape our view of what is valuable, what is beautiful, and what is important in life. — Nancy Leigh DeMoss

My big influences are Joni Mitchell, and a lot of classical and Indian music, as well as Nina Simone and the personal blues and jazz of Billie Holiday. Other influences for me include Bjork, Nick Drake, and Sufjan Stevens. — Yael Naim

My biggest poetic influences are probably 20th-century British and Irish poets. So I suppose I'm always listening for the music I associate with that poetry, the telling images, the brevity. I want to hear it in my own work as well as in the poetry I read. However, I think I'm generally more forgiving of other poets than myself. — David Starkey

Growing up with country, R&B, gospel, and classical music from my grandmother and pop, Tuskegee was the perfect melting pot for my influences as a writer. — Lionel Richie

'The Beatles' did whatever they wanted. They were a collection of influences adapted to songs they wanted to write. George Harrison was instrumental in bringing in Indian music. Paul McCartney was a huge Little Richard fan. John Lennon was into minimalist aggressive rock. — Chris Cornell

My songwriting is so influenced by orchestrated music, dramatic, super glam rock-y stuff. Two of my biggest influences in songwriting were Elton John and Freddie Mercury. — Brandi Carlile

I'm not inspired by songwriting at all; that took place years ago. I'm pretty well established, as far as my influences go. I don't listen to music anymore. It all sounds the same to me. — Mose Allison

I think music influences fashion and has done so for generations. — Georgia Jagger

Art is a kind of magic. Creativity is mysterious, even to artists, who might be able to name their inspiration but can't always explain how their influences and experiences came together to create this new thing- this painting, this story, this song. If you break art down to its base elements, there's nothing miraculous about the letters of the alphabet or a drop of paint. But an artist can put those elements together to create something powerful, something that moves us and withstands the test of time. A work that no one but that artist could have imagined, let alone created. — Sarah Cross

We love all kinds of music: We love pop music, we love rock music, we love R & B and country, and we just pull from all our influences. So I don't really take offense as long as people are coming out to the shows and buying the records and becoming fans of the music. At the end of the day, the music is what's gonna speak to you. — Charles Kelley

I'm a mad thinker in general. I think about everything, all the time. Especially when I write music, a lot of the influences come from personal experiences or from being on the outside looking in, being that person who witnessed things that stuck with me throughout my life. — Adam Hicks

You always draw from your roots. I'm influenced by everything I hear and see, and that includes music today, but obviously I go back to my early influences: Stevie Wonder, Parliament, Earth, Wind & Fire, Ohio Players, Average White Band. Those kind of artists are what I look to. When I hear that stuff on the radio, I turn it up! — Donny Osmond

As far as spiritual influences in Christian music, I would say Crystal Lewis - a lot of her songs especially. The ministry she has through her songs has really hit me. — Stacie Orrico

It's hard to say. Whenever you play with a group of people for a long time it influences the way that you play with others. They were all very defining in their own way and all affected the band in one way or another. I don't think they are so obvious in the music. The fact is that The Lawrence Arms is the culmination of a long search of trying to find people who play well as a unit. — Chris McCaughan

I'm still kind of a hapless character in my everyday life. But when it comes to the writing, my influences are very old influences. I love American music of absolutely all stripes, including show tunes, advertising jingles, theme tunes from quiz shows, all kinds of American music. — Nick Lowe

What we seem to perceive influences what we feel, and what we feel influences what we say we perceive — Jenefer Robinson

I hope we can keep doing it this way - making music and art that are pure products of our influences while not really having to let the whole celebrity side of it get in the way. Then maybe more virtual bands will come out and do the same thing. — Damon Albarn

Sam Phillips always encouraged me to do it my way, to use whatever other influences I wanted, but never to copy ... if there hadn't been a Sam Phillips, I might still be working in a cotton field. — Johnny Cash

I think that our lyrics are definitely dark, but I know for a fact that we pull our inspiration from a million different influences. We listened to everything growing up. Our music isn't just 'opera metal' or 'gothic pop' it's just Evanescence. — Evanescence

During the writing process, I tend not to listen to too much music. I obviously wear a lot of influences on my sleeve, but if I was listening to too many records, I would turn into too much of a monkey. — Jay Reatard

In the etheric body are centered the forces animating man's physical vehicle, so disease is evidenced in the etheric before it manifests in the physical. The etheric, composed of finer, more attenuated substances than the physical, is corresponding amenable to vibratory influences. It is upon the former that harmony and rhythm have the most potent effect. Good music readjusts its molecular structure in accordance with the original divine plan, the archetype, and refines and accentuates it's vibratory currents. All forms of beauty and harmony increase this regenerating process. — Corinne Heline

We've always had a lot of different influences and we've always liked catchy music from the Beatles to Cheap Trick to Elvis Costello. — Chuck Comeau

Yes, I said; and men of this stamp will be covetous of money, like those who live in oligarchies; they will have, a fierce secret longing after gold and silver, which they will hoard in dark places, having magazines and treasuries of their own for the deposit and concealment of them; also castles which are just nests for their eggs, and in which they will spend large sums on their wives, or on any others whom they please. That is most true, he said. And they are miserly because they have no means of openly acquiring the money which they prize; they will spend that which is another man's on the gratification of their desires, stealing their pleasures and running away like children from the law, their father: they have been schooled not by gentle influences but by force, for they have neglected her who is the true Muse, the companion of reason and philosophy, and have honoured gymnastic more than music. Undoubtedly, — Plato

Janis Joplin is definitely one of my biggest influences. She taught me how to feel music, and I don't think there's anyone like her that could bring such pain and emotion to a song. — LeAnn Rimes

I'm trying to be me and embrace all the parts of me that have grown up, listened to more music and soaked up more influences. — John Legend

My influences were mostly gospel. So I was playing my twisted Jewish equivalent of gospel music over his twisted equivalent of rock and roll music. And it was a very excellent marriage. — Al Kooper

I couldn't imagine what it's like to be a journalist talking about music. You're left with empty descriptions; you probably have to make up a sort of weird cocktail of band influences and references to other music to get your point across. — Ariel Pink

Education should aim at destroying free will so that
pupils thus schooled, will be incapable throughout
the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise
than as their schoolmasters would have wished ...
Influences of the home are obstructive; and in order
to condition students, verses set to music and repeatedly
intoned are very effective ... It is for a
future scientist to make these maxims precise and
to discover exactly how much it costs per head to
make children believe that snow is black. When the
technique has been perfected, every government that
has been in charge of education for more than one
generation will be able to control its subjects securely
without the need of armies or policemen. — Bertrand Russell

My influences are vast and varied. I was into classic rock at the same time that I was into hip-hop. It was just that hip-hop was the first music that I got really really into. Rock was right on its tail. — Paul Banks

You don't just have to be influenced by rock, or goth, anymore. It's okay to say, 'My influences are Tin Pan music from Bali and Rihanna.' There are still so many combinations that haven't been done yet. — Grimes

I love fashion. For me, it's always interesting because I like to be able to mix up different styles and different brands, kind of like how my music taste or personality is. There's lots of influences. — Tinashe

I'm from the Bob Wills and the Little Richard school of music. Bob Wills did what the hell he thought, Little Richard did what he thought, and those were my big influences. — Buck Owens

Music is so important. It changes thinking, it influences everybody, whether they know it or not. Music knows no boundary lines. — Irving Berlin

I think some of my inspiration came from just being around music. My family was into music. My uncle had his own band and my father use to sing in my uncle's band. If you want to go to the music influences we could be here all day. That's everybody from Michael Jackson all the way up to people in the game now that inspire me. — Nelly

I'd say the music influences the writing - the music and rhythm of the prose - much more than the writing influences the music. — Rob Roberge

There are a lot of influences from different countries in my music. For example, I chose the guitar in my music, I think that it is a feminine instrument, so when I do not sing, the music expresses my voice. — Paulina Rubio

Music's always part of my writing. I think all art is interconnected. You can't create or experience one without its influences bleeding into another. In my writing, music's mostly something that feeds my inspiration and mood while I'm writing, but it's also taught me how to score scenes and even novels. The rise and fall of the storyline echoes the flow of a good piece of music. — Charles De Lint

We live in a post-authentic world, and today authenticity is a house of mirrors. It's all just what you're bringing when the lights go down. It's your teachers, your influences, and your personal history. At the end of the day, it's the power and purpose of your music that still matters. — Bruce Springsteen

The E Street band casts a pretty wide net. Our influences go all the way back to the early primitive garage music, and also, we've had everything in the band from jazz players to Kansas City trumpet players to Nils Lofgren, one of the great rock guitarists in the world. — Bruce Springsteen

The nature of music is mysterious and so much so that it generates strong emotions within us. It moves along passages that reach the most intimate areas of our psyche without being tried by prejudices or influences of any kind. — Andrea Bocelli

My main influences are pop and folk music - Bob Lind, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, the Motown collection, The Zombies, Elliott Smith, and a ton of 70's AM radio hits. I love powerpop too. — Greta Salpeter

I know we play a part in the story of progressive music, but for us those influences are the real fathers, the ones that we were interested in. — John Petrucci

I buy records from all across the board. I get kind of a hybrid of influences in my own music. — Jason Mraz

There's not one thing in particular that influences my music, but I write about what I know. It's based in personal experience. That's not to say all the songs are biographical, because sometimes it's what I've seen in others' lives. — Holly Golightly

As surely as the sunset in my latest November
shall translate me to the ethereal world,
and remind me of the ruddy morning of youth;
as surely as the last strain of music which falls on my decaying ear
shall make age to be forgotten,
or, in short, the manifold influences of nature
survive during the term of our natural life,
so surely my Friend shall forever be my Friend,
and reflect a ray of God to me,
and time shall foster and adorn and consecrate our Friendship,
no less than the ruins of temples. — Henry David Thoreau

I always wanted to do music that influences and inspires each generation. — Michael Jackson

In Holland, things were pretty stale for me. Even though there were a lot of good influences and a certain openness to music and art and literature, I just wanted to go somewhere less familiar - somewhere bigger. — Ari Marcopoulos

Influences come from everywhere. I don't really feel like I had too many influences for the first record because I grew up listening to music in church, and that was pretty much it. I didn't really grow up listening to AC/DC and all those bands. — Avril Lavigne

You don't get to pick your family, but you can pick your teachers and you can pick your friends and you can pick the music you listen to and you can pick the books you read and you can pick the movies you see. You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences. The German writer Goethe said, We are shaped and fashioned by what we love. — Austin Kleon

Basically my influences have been American influences. It's been blues, gospel, swing era music, bebop music, Broadway show music, classical music. It's like making a stew. You put all these various ingredients in it. You season it with this. You put that in it. You put the other in it. You mix it all up and it comes out something neat, something that you created. — Horace Silver

It's quite interesting that in my growing up I had several influences. We had gospel music on campus. R&B music was, of course, the community, and radio was country music. So I can kind of see where all the influences came from. — Lionel Richie

It was not really the external influences that made me a singer. Music was within me. I was full of it. — Lata Mangeshkar

I guess I would call my music 'blues punk.' There's a lot of influences. — Benjamin Booker

I definitely love music that's coming out now, there's some really exciting fresh artists coming through which is really cool. I guess it's from old and new, where my influences are based. — Ella Henderson

Latin music has many international influences - pop, rock, country, Brazilian sounds, and alternative styles. — Ednita Nazario

I went to high school right outside Dallas, and (songwriter and performer) Michael Martin Murphey was a senior there when I was a sophomore or junior, really into folk and acoustic music. Larry Gross, who's the host of "Mountain Stage" on public radio, and B.W. Stevenson, also a musician, were there at the same time, too. Michael was a big inspiration
through him I discovered Woody Guthrie, Dylan, Jimmy Rogers. Then I ran into Jerry Jeff Walker there in Dallas back when he was just a folk singer. Those are my earliest influences. — Ray Wylie Hubbard

When a waggon with a train of beautiful horses, furnished with red trappings and clear-sounding bells came by us with its music, I believe we could all three have sung to the bells, so cheerful were the influences around ...
We had stopped, and the waggon had stopped too. Its music changed as the horses came to a stand, and subsided to a gentle tinkling, except when a horse tossed his head, or shook himself, and sprinkled off a little shower of bellringing. — Charles Dickens

Personally, I love the cookie monster grunts. I like how they alienate listeners. We sound the way we sound. We're individuals. We don't all like the same music. Everybody contributes their own influences, style, and history. — David Pajo

I'm a businesswoman. I am a music lover. I like for people to like my music. When you listen to top 40 radio, you hear pop stuff. You hear rock stuff. You hear all these different influences. — Lee Ann Womack

I'm an Australian, and when I grew up much of my influences were American - blues music and country music, all that sort of thing. — Nick Cave

I have come to use the pan-Celtic history, which spans from 500 BC to the present, as a creative springboard. The music I am creating is a result of traveling down that road and picking up all manner of themes and influences, which may or may not be overtly Celtic in nature. — Loreena McKennitt

There's always peripheral things that you like that you don't know, but starting with whatever his British influences are, are some of my favourite artists, and the American things are what I grew up on as well. In the end, for me, it's those foundations of the music business - those things that are a lot of the foundations of what music today is. You can hear a bit of all of those things that we talk about in almost all music today. — Paul Weller

Music is either sacred or profane. What is sacred accords completely with its nobility, and this is where music most immediately influences life; such influence remains unchanged at all times and in every epoch. Profane music should be altogether cheerful.
Music of a kind that mixes the sacred with the profane is godless and shoddy music wich goes in for expressing feeble, wretched, deplorable feelings, and is just insipid. For it is not serious enough to be sacred and it lacks the chief quality of the opposite kind: cheerfulness. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

A person's native tongue influences the way he or she perceives music. The same succession of notes may sound different depending on the language the listener learned growing up.12 As evidence, speakers of tonal languages including Mandarin are more likely than Westerners to have perfect pitch. In one study, 92 percent of Mandarin speakers who began the music lessons at or before the age of five had perfect pitch compared to 8 percent of English speakers with comparable music training. — Ken Robinson

My influences are with Irish music, church music and classical music, — Enya

What motivates it is life. Life is everything. Life influences my music and brings it forth. Life is always changing, so I'm always hearing new music. — Lenny Kravitz

Any saxophone player will have those influences come through in their music in a very different way. I can listen to the same 10 sax players as someone else for my entire life, and we'll both play completely differently. That's the beauty of being a musician. — Kenny G

When my dad played me 'Walking Man,' I heard those chord changes and that melody, it completely blew me away. Maybe you wouldn't really hear the James Taylor influences in my music, but they're definitely buried in there. — Charlie Puth

I always want to do music that inspires or influences another generation. You want what you create to live, be it sculpture or painting or music. Like Michelangelo, he said, I know the creator will go, but his work survives. That is why to escape death, I attempt to bind my soul to my work. — Michael Jackson

There are many influences in my music, not only blues. R&B, Motown, gospel, old timey, jazz, even classical are all part of what I do. I started with classical, then country, then blues, and after that I started listening heavily to Motown and gospel. My earliest efforts as a songwriter were soul. Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, Wilson Pickett, Gladys Knight, James Brown, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye and Fontella Bass are just a few of the names that come to mind as the God's of soul and Motown. — Rory Block

If it weren't for how esoteric the art world likes to be, I would love actually to play the music in the shows, painting the music that influences me most. — Damian Loeb

Everyone has their parent's [music] collection which is strongly influences what you listen to as a kid. You have no choice. You have to listen to whatever they're bumpin. I grew up with what they listened to a lot. — Ryan Lewis

Music has always been transnational; people pick up whatever interests them, and certainly a lot of classical music has absorbed influences from all over the world. — Yo-Yo Ma

I felt bad because Little Big Tom came in while we were making the tape and was like over the moon because he thought we were interested in his music. We had to humor him and listen to him deliver around six hundred speeches about fusion and the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Chicano and Latino influences on pretentious jazzy pseudorock. I think it was probably the happiest I'd ever seen him. And I also felt bad about the fact that after he left we kind of made fun of the funny way he said Latino, like he was the Frito Bandito or something. I felt bad, but I did it anyway, because I'm only human. I was ashamed of myself and depressed afterward, though, which is human, too, I guess. Being human is an excuse for just about everything, but it also kind of sucks in a way. — Frank Portman

Hendrix was back there with a few of the others who were like my training wheels ... hearing him as a teenager taught me to look at the guitar in a different way - and how to tap into that thing inside of me that was already leaning toward improvisation. You learn other players' licks at first; then you take off the training wheels and start using the licks as building blocks to make your own thing. That's how influences work. somewhere in whatever I do, there's a little bit of Hendrix - plus about a hundred others — Junior Brown

My influences are jazz, blues, European classical music; they are rock music and pop music. So many kinds of music. World music from different countries like India and China. I think that would be a shame not to take advantage and do something ... not unique, because I don't have this pretension. — Rokia Traore

Jay Z in many ways is a rock artist. In the sense that they've used hard rock, punk rock, psychedelic rock aesthetics and influences in their music. When you see Kanye West, he has a full band playing. Jay Z has a full band playing with Marshalls. — Ian Astbury

I have increasingly become conversant with Pythagoras' and Goethe's idea of a primordial music, not perceptible to the sensuous ear, but sounding and soaring throughout the cosmos. Tracing it to such exalted origins, I begin to understand more deeply the essence of our art and its elemental power over the human soul. Man, being a creature of Nature and subject to the cosmic influences that inform all earthly beings, must needs have been under the sway of that music from his earliest days; his organism reverberated with its vibrations and received it's rhythmic impulses. — Bruno Walter

Everything we (the Grateful Dead) ever did was a demonstration of the value of cross-fertilization, It was unconscious at first, but when we started looking at each other, we had all these different influences ... Bobby Weir used to call it electric Dixieland. — Phil Lesh

Any new ideas go into PiL. My inspiration is everything that the human being gets up to. I don't listen to any music when I'm in PiL-zone, because influences can poison your well. Otherwise, I listen to anything. — John Lydon

Jazz has the ability to absorb & transform influences from diverse musical styles. — Andrew S. Gilbert

Music and literature have always and continue to be massive influences. Writers such as Seamus Heaney and Frank McGuinness. I have always admired the humanitarians that I knew growing up in Derry whose influence steered me in the direction of some of the work that I have chosen in the past. — Bronagh Gallagher

Everything in life influences my music. I've always used songwriting as a means to share what I think is profound. — Jason Mraz

Color directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul. — Wassily Kandinsky

To deny that music powerfully influences our thoughts and conduct is either ignorant or a deliberate lie. Anyone who listens to music has been moved by it. It's music, that's the point. — Dessa Darling

I think every once in a while country has lost its way, but found its way back. It's always going to drift away from the traditional side, but then find a way to return. There's room for all kinds of influences be it pop, blues, gospel or whatever. But I will always say that I think we need more traditional country music coming down the pike. — Randy Travis