Real Musicians Quotes & Sayings

My father started his own business, and before that was a freelance lecturer, and my friends are artists and musicians; they don't have real jobs - none of us have real jobs. — Rupert Friend

All musicians start out with ideals but hanging on to them in the face of media scrutiny takes real integrity. Tougher still is to live up to the ideals of your dedicated fans. — Billy Bragg

It is so hard for musicians when they step into acting is they're not coming in as a blank slate, they're coming in with a real set idea of who they are, where they're coming from, what their politics are, what their tastes are. — Shirley Manson

I'm not a real musician. If you give me a bass guitar and you ask me to improvise something, or even be with some musicians and follow them, I wouldn't be able to do it. And I want to change that. I want to be able to be in a group and take my guitar and play with them, without someone showing me, "Okay, you're going to do this and that," because music has always been a big part of my life. — Marion Cotillard

I'm the perfect amount of guarded. I don't reveal too much, and I never reveal who the songs are about. They are real life. People get that. I date a lot of musicians and they do the same thing. People that work with me - who I write about too - they get it. It's my creative outlet, my therapy. — Kelly Clarkson

We were brash young fellows'. I was always hanging with the older crowd anyway. The musicians were the Hip Cats, and I was hanging with them anyway. I Just started out real early. — Bootsy Collins

I think maybe people see bands and musicians as some sort of superhero unrealistic sport that happens in another dimension where it's not real people and not real emotions. So, I grew up listening to Beatles records on my floor. That's how I learned how to play guitar. If it weren't for them, I wouldn't be a musician. — Dave Grohl

I met Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I'm not really star struck by actors, but musicians, that's when I get star struck. Chad Smith is my number one drum influence, so that was a real mind-blow. I spoke to him - proper English, thank God! — Christopher Mintz-Plasse

Aside from comic book heroes, the only real life heroes I had were musicians. — Andy Biersack

Many musicians are fabulously skilled at playing the black dots on the printed page, but mystified by how the dots got there in the first place and apprehensive of playing without dots. Music theory does not help here; it teaches rules of the grammar, but not what to say. When people ask me how to improvise, only a little of what I can say is about music. The real story is about spontaneous expression, and it is therefore a spiritual and a psychological story rather than a story about the technique of one art form or another. — Stephen Nachmanovitch

I was starting a group of musicians and we had a group of young composers in Finland back in the '70s, and the real conductors, the professional conductors at the time were not interested in our stuff. — Esa-Pekka Salonen

The records that I like, they have life and warmth and soul in them. Like the slap back on Scotty Moore's guitar on 'Mystery Train.' You're not gonna get that in a computer. You're gonna want a live room, you're gonna wanna bounce the tape, you're gonna want real musicians, in a room, vibin' off of each other. — Channing Tatum

The chanting went on, the musicians giving in to the rhythm of their own being, finding healing in touching that rhythm, and healing in chanting about death, the only real god they knew. — Karl Marlantes

There's something about live players that you cannot get with machines: With live musicians, you can strike a groove, you can feed off each other ... And, even though somebody might make a slight mistake, it's all real! — Isaac Hayes

I would say that for the younger musicians, technical proficiency is necessary and a given these days. But the study and the way you function in society, your beliefs and the way you live, that is where you will find a real musician, a real artist. — David Finckel

Yes, I would loved to have just sustained myself through my art, but less than one in a billion musicians gets that life. So rather than being like, 'I'm an exception!', like a moron, I thought I'd get a real job. — Mary Lambert

I like characters. I like spirited characters whether they exist in fiction or real life. Whether they're the invention of artistic people or directors, musicians. I think music and art and fashion designers inspire me and I like characters. — Marc Jacobs

The Musicians Hall of Fame is chosen by thousands of your peers. So it's the real thing. — Dick Dale

We're not getting paid. We have these great musicians with us and it gives us a real charge. And the audience gives us a charge, because they keep it interesting all the time. — Tina Weymouth

We're not like a nostalgia act, or the normal classic rock act - we're a really good musical organization, ... You're going to hear some blues, some jazz, a little of everything. The guys in the band are great musicians. When we play, we're there for real. It's not about posing, strutting in tights, that kind of stuff. It's all about music, and I've always respected my audience that way. — Steve Miller

What I found about 'Nashville' coming in is it's about these small performances. It can be on a big stage but detailed, small, heartfelt, real performances from musicians and singers. So if you try to do something bloated or showy, the directors dial us in and let us know. — Chip Esten

You're always in a tunnel that you can't see the end of. But there's something that took place on this movie that I don't think we expected and that was that once we decided that the entire cast would be real retired opera singers and retired musicians ... and these people the phone hadn't rung for them for 20 or 40 years even though they can deliver. — Dustin Hoffman

The anti-nuke movement has important and far-reaching implications for grassroots organizing. It can unite kids and musicians, everybody, whether they're leftist or rightist, or radical, or Republican, because energy is energy. But in fact, it is a real political struggle - it shows people that it's big business against the people. — Bonnie Raitt

In some ways, jazz is the most precise of art forms and the loosest in the sense that it's all about improvisation, but the musicianship required is kind of insane. To actually play with real jazz musicians is a different level of musicianship that almost has no equal in any other form of music in the world. — Damien Chazelle

I know a lot of people that have had fake Twitters ... actors and musicians that I know. It's sort of a problem. There are all these people that sign up thinking that they're getting somebody's real thoughts when it's just some guy. — Zooey Deschanel

There was a time when hip-hop was its own musical principle, aside from sampling. Like the entire Wild Style break is instrumental. Kurtis Blow's earliest stuff was studio musicians playing. Whodini had a real clear sound, things like "five minutes of funk," stuff that you could write really beautiful, lush string and horn arrangements around, stuff that was just music. — Mos Def

I get really insecure because even though I can speak in musician's terms, I don't know as much as real musicians. — Zooey Deschanel

The studio is really fun because I don't make it into the studio unless I've got something I really like. I love working with different musicians in the studio; that's a real joy, working with someone for the first time. — Bob Seger

It's great to have all this stuff at home. But when you want to make it for real, there's still nothing like making music with a bunch of other great musicians in the same room. That's one thing that'll never change. — Ronnie Milsap

Involve yourself every day. Work hard and figure out how to love acting all day, every day. It's getting into a made-up situation and making it good and making it real and just playing, just practicing and playing. Like the musicians that I played piano with: they never expect to be rich or famous, but they, for the sheer joy of it, play every day, all day. — Jeff Goldblum

My musical education started in the limelight, because I found myself surrounded by real musicians, but after my career had taken off. — John Lurie

I know there are a lot of musicians and a lot of artists, and there are a lot of writers and other people who inspire young people, but I'd like to see somebody in political life be able to connect and make these choices that we need to make in Washington real in terms of people's lives. — John F. Kerry

Grigoryevich...Not that he had any real talent himself - but what a lot of deaths of talented people he had witnessed. Young physicists and historians, specialists in ancient languages, philosophers, musicians, young Russian Swifts and Erasmuses - how many of them he had seen put on their "wooden jackets." Prerevolutionary literature had often lamented the fate of serf actors, musicians, and painters. But who was there today to write about the young men and women who had never had the chance to write their books and paint their paintings? The Russian earth is indeed fertile and generous. She gives birth to her own Platos, to her own quick-witted Newtons - but how casually and terribly she devours these children of hers. — Vasily Grossman

Singers, musicians, and songwriters don't want to use the word "acting" because we want it to be more real than that - we want it to come from us: naturally, truly, really. — Ronee Blakley

People don't understand real musicians anymore. Jack White is great - he's the real thing - but he isn't having hits. — Prince

If you're an artist, you want to draw from real life; you want to draw from experiences, emotion, and it's something that a lot of musicians juggle with. I've always found it so fascinating. — Damien Chazelle

Isn't my music the last of the real rhythm and blues? Isn't it great? It's because of my musicians, we were weaned on Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, all the founding fathers, the gods of thunder, who invented the foundation and the pulse of the greatest music in the world! — Ted Nugent

You've got certain guys that just want to be famous and then you've got the real musicians that just love playing music. — Zakk Wylde

I watched her perform on the Grammys and she totally sucked. The song 'All I Want to Do is Have Some Fun' sucks and when she walked out of that place with all those Grammies I knew I was going to give mine away. I did. If they're giving them away for crap, I don't want one in my place. What an insult to real music and musicians everywhere. — Henry Rollins

What is scurrilously called ragtime is an invention that is here to stay. That is now conceded by all classes of musicians ... All publication s masquerading under the name of ragtime are not the genuine article ... That real ragtime of the higher class is rather difficult to play is a painful truth which most pianists have discovered. Syncopations are no indication of light or trashy music ... Joplin ragtime is destroyed by careless or imperfect rendering, and very often players lost the effect entirely by playing too fast. — Scott Joplin

I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time. — Bonnie Raitt

What propels an embryo from one stage to the next-and makes one species different from another-is not a blueprint but rather an enormous autonomous library of the instructions contained within its genome. Each gene does double duty, specifying both a recipe for a protein and a set of regulatory conditions for when and where it should be built. Taken together suites of these IF-THEN genes give cells the power to act as parts of complicated improvisational orchestras. Like real musicians, what they play depends on both their own artistic impulses and what the other members of the orchestra are playing. As we will see in the next chapter, every bit of this process-from the Cellular Big 4 to the combination of regulatory cues-holds as much for development of the brain as it does for the body. — Gary F. Marcus

Visible Faith is an expression of my Christian faith which must be visible to be real! I gave the name to the collection of musicians who worked with me on the record. — Ken Hensley

We musicians play in Time and with Time, but sometimes it is Time that plays with us. One day, unpredictably, the evolution of culture makes real an oeuvre which has lain in obscurity. — Igor Markevitch

The primary math of the real world is one and one equals two. The layman (as, often, do I) swings that every day. He goes to the job, does his work, pays his bills and comes home. One plus one equals two. It keeps the world spinning. But artists, musicians, con men, poets, mystics and such are paid to turn that math on its head, to rub two sticks together and bring forth fire. Everybody — Bruce Springsteen

I try not to repeat myself. It's the hardest thing in the world to do-there are only so many notes one human being can master ... One of the reasons we're going out on the road and why we're titling this tour as "Musicology" is because we want to bring that back. We want to teach the kids and musicians of the future the art of song writing, the art of real musicianship. — Prince

If you look at the history of popular music, the most successful musicians have started out being really marginal and esoteric. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Madonna. Prince. Bruce Springsteen. Fleetwood Mac. David Bowie. Public Enemy. Nirvana. — Moby

Okay, you can stay at home and Spotify, or YouTube, or you can get off your ass and come listen to what real musicians making real music sound like. And, hey, it doesn't have to be me, but if I'm in town, then yeah, you should definitely check me out. — Nicholas Payton

There's been this perception that Europeans still hold on to, that they discover the real talented ones in American culture and give them proper credit and that's not true anymore - it used to be. A lot of jazz musicians would get respect in Europe. — Andrew Bird

Science will ... produce the data ... , but never the
full meaning. For perceiving real significance, we
shall need ... most of all the brains of poets, [and]
also those of artists, musicians, philosophers,
historians, writers in general. — Lewis Thomas

People want to see musicians sing things that come from their own mind and own heart in real time, responding to the moment for them. — John Mayer

You should play with real musicians; the best music comes from real people interacting with each other. — John Fogerty

The music has had a certain quality that people like just because it's a real true expression of how we are as musicians. — Matt Cameron