Recordings Quotes & Sayings

I did extensive, extensive recordings and made a classical CD-ROM set, which is still on the market. For ten years, it was by itself as the cream of the crop of samples. — Miroslav Vitous

I got more used to my own voice, but still it's hard for me to listen to my own voice, or hear the recordings. — Meg White

I learnt from Armstrong on the early recordings that you never sang a song the same way twice. — Van Morrison

This is ... an attempt to find some of the important fault lines in the narrative of "recorded history"
the points where people with access to the technology decided that *this* was how recordings should sound, and *this* is what it means to make a record. Ultimately, this is the story of what it means to make a recording of music
a *representation* of music
and declare it to be music itself. — Greg Milner

My manager came up with the idea of taking a Pro Tool rig out on the road to record every night and I thought it was a great idea. I felt like it would be good to record over a certain period of time and then take the best performances of that collection of recordings. It appealed to me that it wasn't going to be from just one location. — Josh Turner

Anytime there is a Bigfoot show, where they supposedly have recordings of him, I am watching. I love the idea of Bigfoot. I want him to be out there somewhere. — Allen Covert

At the Isle of Wight, the sound went out and kind of kept on going. And I wasn't ... when I came off stage I was kind of unhappy about how we had played. But now, I listen back to those recordings and it's not bad. — Keith Emerson

The memories you have are just recordings of things past, not chains to bind you. — Michael Dolan

These days, I find it harder to listen to really trebly lo-fi recordings. At the same time, without the old limitations, these new technologies require self control. So much of the software seems to be about correcting imperfections - quantizing, Auto-tune - and, to me, those corrections can really drain the life out of a performance. — Michael Dumontier

I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn't want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing. So I developed two ideas in that way. 'Discreet Music' was like that, and 'Music for Airports.' What you hear on the recordings is a little part of one of those processes working itself out. — Brian Eno

Lately, though, he'd just been tired in general. Tired of people. Tired of books and TV and the nightly news and songs on the radio he'd heard years before and hadn't liked much in the first place. He was tired of his clothes and tired of his hair and tired of other people's clothes and other people's hair. He was tired of wishing things made sense. He'd gotten to a point where he was pretty sure he'd heard everything anyone had to say on any given subject and so it seemed he spent his days listening to old recordings of things that hadn't seemed fresh the first time he'd heard them.
Maybe he was simply tired of life, of the absolute effort it took to get up every goddamned morning and walk out with into the same fucking day with only slight variations in the weather and food.
He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope. — Dennis Lehane

My favorite recordings are the ones that feel like there were no middlemen in the creation. That's the biggest problem with most films and records being made today - too many people involved. I think it dilutes the artist's intent and inspiration. — M. Ward

If I think about the way I was drawn into the music, it was much more by recordings than by live performances. — Evan Parker

I'd like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing "What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue"-all at the same time. Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound. — Ralph Ellison

I gathered all the different Peel Sessions recordings together - I did six or seven of them over the years - and listened to all of them. These definitely have at least a superficial relationship to each other because they're all very spare. — Will Oldham

One of the greatest live recordings, I think, in the history of the world is Ray Charles in Atlanta ... And they didn't even have a big mobile recording thing set up. The word on the street was they only had like two microphones, one for the band and one for him. Perfect recordings. I think it's mono. — Robbie Robertson

The difference between Spotify and Internet radio services like Pandora is that Spotify is interactive. You can sample the complete catalogue of most artists' recordings. — John Seabrook

Never have so many recordings of the great Masses and motets been in wider circulation. — Richard Morris

I've come to realize that you live on through recordings; they're like a musical diary, a window into somebody's soul. — Joe Perry

my two primary sleep aids, Behemoth and a YouTube recording of a vacuum cleaner, the Hoover WindTunnel. I don't know why I find the sound comforting, Doc, when I was a child in Cairo, my afternoon naps coincided with the rhythmic beating of carpets outside the bedroom, I was used to sleeping to that sound, but no one beat carpets anymore, a shame, though lo and behold, I found that not only did a vacuum cleaner remove dirt more effectively, it summoned Hypnos just as well as a beating, and there were twelve-hour-long recordings of all kinds of household machines online, welcome to America, now go to sleep. Maybe — Rabih Alameddine

We're gonna release a studio album probably a year from now and we've got these recordings that we did with Coco Taylor and Johnny Johnson, who was Chuck Berry's piano player. — James Young

It was a music that had so little wisdom you wanted to clean nearly every note he passed, passed it seemed along the way as if travelling in a car, passed before he even approached it and saw it properly. There was no control except the mood of his power ... and it is for this reason it is good you never heard him play on recordings. If you never heard him play some place where the weather for instance could change the next series of notes - then you should never have heard him at all. He was never recorded. — Michael Ondaatje

The musical flags of the world should fly at half mast because truly one of the greatest guitarists in the world and king of the blues has died. I have cherished him and so has the rest of the world who knew him and loved him for his entire career. As we pain, we must celebrate that his music, his style of playing and singing will last forever, from the recordings that he has done and the influence that he has had and will have on guitarists all over this planet. Long live the spirit of B.B. King. — Stevie Wonder

I'm always making music. I'm constantly making little musical recordings on my phone or on a little voice recorder I carry with me so I can remember these little pieces of music that eventually becomes songs. — James Taylor

Recordings of Georgian folk polyphonic songs makes a great musical impression. They are recorded in a tradition of active reproduction of Georgian folk music the origin of which begins from ancient time. It is a wonderful finding and can give to the performance much more than all the modem music can ... Yodel or "Krimanchuli" as it is called in Georgia is the best song which I have ever heard. ["America" magazine, No 23 1967] — Igor Stravinsky

Most of my recorded material has been in small group configurations. I have not released large orchestral works as recordings because it hasn't been within the realm of possibility. — Bill Dixon

The question of what exactly we remember when we listen to old recordings, or whether it can be called remembering at all, becomes less and less answerable over a lifetime. — Geoffrey O'Brien

Perhaps within the next hundred years, science will perfect a process of thought transference from composer to listener. The composer will sit alone on the concert stage and merely 'think' his idealized conception of his music. Instead of recordings of actual music sound, recordings will carry the brainwaves of the composer directly to the mind of the listener. — Raymond Scott

If I look at my own recordings, I think generally there is a focal point within the song and often it's the instrumental bridge or a guitar solo where we try to do something unexpected, something beautiful or weird, or beautiful because it is weird. And of course I fail half the time, but yes that is the goal, to create even a few seconds of bliss, or sadness. The electric guitar is a great instrument for doing this because it is capable of surprising you. There are so many different sounds available. — Dean Wareham

I was once all by myself in a house on Fire Island. Where I compared the original cast recordings of two different versions of The Wild Party. A helicopter should have descended and taken me away to a gay penal colony. But of course, I was already there. — Paul Rudnick

Apparitions are often confused with hauntings. The difference is that apparitions are "live" (intelligent consciousness) and hauntings are "recordings. — Loyd Auerbach

Performing is a thing in itself, a distinct skill, different from making recordings. And for those who can do it, it's a way to make a living. — David Byrne

One of the things that's influenced me musically was my experience at Brown University. I was surrounded by musicians that I really admired, and felt challenged to come up with music, lyrics, and recordings that stood up to the expectations of those musicians and myself. — Lisa Loeb

The books are recordings; that's what they have to be, recordings of the writing. They have to be happening to me. — Tony Burgess

I find that I'm always struggling with the noise of the city. When I get a good take, there will be a horn or a siren or something. So it makes me very conscious of outside sounds, which in a way maybe led me to incorporate the field recordings. — Julia Kent

Country Music has always changed for the times, if you listen to the recordings from the 50's to 60's to 70's, to now, the message is still there, basic down to earth songs about real people, it the music that's been updated. Some of it I like, but still prefer the traditional sound. — Mark Chesnutt

I am proud of my connections to Carolina and pleased to know that some results from a lifetime of work on television, film, stage and recordings will have a permanent home in Chapel Hill. — Andy Griffith

My husband is a musician. He cooks and he's a chef but he also, he makes basement recordings. So many people in my life make basement recordings, so I feel very lucky, I'm surrounded by very creative people. — Dana Spiotta

I just remembered songs my grandmother taught me, and songs that I learned for the recordings. But, then I learned to speak Italian. When I was there, I hired a professor who stayed with me 24 hours a day. She wouldn't let me speak a word of English. — Connie Francis

The tax incentives are things the music business can emulate. If I own Yesterday by the Beatles and I go to a bank and try to borrow $10,000 and use that song as collateral, they wouldn't know what to do. They would run me out of the bank. Whereas if we get specialized people who know how to appraise the value of intellectual property like songs, catalogs and master recordings, they know how to put some type of value on it. They have this in Nashville and Los Angeles. New Orleans is just starting to get it. — Chris Thomas King

I insist on a Steinway for my recordings, my concerts and my home. It is the only piano I want to hear my music played on. — Michel Legrand

Throughout the '50s, tons of unknown locals came through Sun to record their demos. Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis all made their first recordings at the former Memphis Recording Service. — Shawn Amos

I don't listen to recordings very much now, to be perfectly honest. I listened to them a lot when I was younger. — Marc-Andre Hamelin

I have a European Fanclub that's based in Holland, and I had to have that President of the Fanclub to get me a number of recordings that I hadn't had the foresight to collect myself. — Gloria Gaynor

The death of the music business was insane, but audio recordings have been around now for maybe 120 years. Books have been around for, what, nine centuries? So they're more entrenched than music. — Stephen King

Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seemed to have vanished completely. — Neil Gaiman

A lot of times good, pristine recordings prevent the listener from getting emotionally involved in the music. — Moby

I'd done recordings, little demos, since I was in college, which I used to get gigs. But I never thought I'd have a record label. — Norah Jones

To me, recordings are little fourth-dimension artifacts, because they already are representatives of past, present, and future, just inherently in their existence. — Will Oldham

As if it were the equal of Western classical or art music. The recordings were given respect, thoughtful presentation, and technical attention that was all too rare for non-Western music. I had grown up on Folkways's Nonesuch field recordings and the stuff Lomax had done for the Library of Congress, but the production values on the Ocora releases were on a whole other level. Eno and I realized that music from elsewhere didn't need to sound distant, scratchy, or "primitive." These recordings were as well produced as any contemporary recording in any genre. You were made to feel, for example, that this music wasn't a ghostly remnant from some lost culture, soon — David Byrne

I'll tell you an incident that happened right at the Brown Derby [restaurant] since I've been here in Honolulu," Armstrong tells a friend on one of the recordings. "You remember that white boy, he's a sailor or something, on one of these battleships, on Pearl Harbor, and he caught my show, and I come to find out he has damn near every record I made from childbirth. "He come up and shook my hand after the whole show was over . . . and he said, 'You know, I don't like Negroes.' "Right to my [expletive] face, that [expletive] told me. And so I said, 'Well, I admire your [expletive] sincerity.' "And he said, 'I don't like Negroes, but you're one [expletive] I'm crazy about. I've got every [expletive] record.' "I've said it for years. You take the majority of white people," continued Armstrong, "they always got one [expletive] at least that they're just crazy about, [expletive]. Every white man in the world got one [expletive] at least that they just love his dirty drawers. — Howard Reich

So the recordings were these immersive landscapes, and yet, unlike the performances that almost no one would see, I had a sense that these could live forever. I was just starting to get my head around the democratic aspect of art; I didn't want to make rarefied things that were either alienatingly obscure or elite and art-worldy, so a recording that anyone could buy was a great medium. — Miranda July

I valued the experience of making the recordings, and I value the performances contained therein, and I value so much of what they can represent. I also think they're a terrific listening experience. Putting them out this way was a way of trying to maintain and nurture the relationship with the audience and also shine a light on the recent past, because we are so apt to be forgetful as human beings that there was such a thing as a recent past. These are some of the reasons for making this record. — Will Oldham

Older recordings just seemed to take me somewhere into my own pre-history. That's always been an interesting, sort of sphinx-like territory for me to wander around in. — Guy Maddin

I love Arthur Rubinstein, especially his live recordings. I think his Chopin Mazurkas, his interpretation of the Polonaises, and the Concertos of Chopin are just incredible. When I was a child, I wanted to play more and more Chopin because of his recordings. — Rafal Blechacz

Breathing in the scent of his hair, I realized I'd needed him my whole life, before we even met. First, his music and the way he taught me through books and recordings. Then, he saved my life and refused to abandon me no matter how much I deserved it. — Jodi Meadows

Recordings aren't time sensitive. You can hear the music you want whether it's morning, noon, or the middle of the night. You can "get into" clubs virtually, "sit" in concert halls you can't afford to visit, go to places that are too far away, or hear people sing about things you don't understand, about lives that are alien, sad, or wonderful. Recorded music can be ripped free from its context, for better and worse. It becomes its own context. — David Byrne

The expectation is this low, gravelly voice for John, but I went through his early recordings and there were songs in there where the voice was so different, I wasn't even sure if it was him singing, ... So it was interesting to me that we would see him develop the Man in Black sound. I thought it was really important that his voice change as his persona slowly solidified. The music was really the doorway into the character. — Joaquin Phoenix

I never did anything with the early recordings I made, I felt they weren't worthy. — Mick Barr

The government paid the family of Richard Nixon $18 million for papers, tape recordings and other materials seized after Watergate. — Dexter Scott King

I don't plan [my recordings], I really don't. It's so spontaneous I wish all rock lovers and rock journalist could witness a Ted Nugent recording session. It is so primal, it's like idiot kids in the garage with their first loud amplifiers, its intoxicating, it is irreverent, it is uninhibited. — Ted Nugent

It is my opinion that religious experience may be a unique combination of Child (a feeling of intimacy) and Adult (a reflection on ultimacy) with the total exclusion of the Parent. I believe the total exclusion of the Parent is what happens in kenosis, or self-emptying. . . . I believe that what is emptied is the Parent. How can one experience joy, or ecstasy, in the presence of those recordings in the Parent with produced NOT OK originally? How can I feel acceptance in the presence of the earliest felt rejection? It is true that Mother was a participant in intimacy in the beginning, but it was an intimacy which did not last, was conditional, and was "never enough." I believe the Adult's function in the religious experience is to block out the Parent in order that the Natural Child may reawaken to its own worth and beauty as a part of God's creation. — Thomas A. Harris

We had various kinds of tape-recorded concerts and popular music. But by the end of the flight what we listened to most was Russian folk songs. We also had recordings of nature sounds: thunder, rain, the singing of birds. We switched them on most frequently of all, and we never grew tired of them. It was as if they returned us to Earth. — Anatoly Berezovoy

I didn't make my first solo record until 1981 so I don't have any 60's or 70's recordings but I am working on a large boxed set called DUST to be released next year, the 20th anniversary of my first solo record. — Adrian Belew

I love the sound of '70s glam records. I love that snare sound. The recordings I like, it's all based on if the snare sounds good. The drums have to sound great. — King Tuff

It's time for a streaming service that is centred around and driven by the artist community directly. Artists are prolific beyond a new recording every two years. They perform, tour, record, and collaborate constantly. Uprise.fm will not only make these rare and unique recordings available, we will ensure that the artists are fairly compensated for this work. — Daniel Lanois

People used to recordings believed every piece of music had a definitive sound, its emotional context trapped in amber, a butterfly pinned to a board; beautiful, but dead. Live music was just that. Alive. — Tanya Huff

I hope my recordings of my own works won't inhibit other people's performances. The brutal fact is that one doesn't always get the exact tempo one wants, although one improves with experience. — Aaron Copland

When I look back at those pictures of my mother performing - and listen to her recordings - it makes me sad to think that all of that joy she found in her work came to an end. I wish she hadn't had to make that sacrifice, even if it was for the benefit of my father and siblings and me. — Marlo Thomas

I love all holiday music. My two favorites would probably be Donny Hathaway's "This Christmas" and Nat King Cole's "The Christmas Song." They epitomize Christmas for me. Those two recordings will never be touched. That's why I've never redone them. — Mariah Carey

There is a definite difference between live shows and the recordings. The recordings are for all time, hopefully, so you do want to bring across layers of subtlety. But the live show is this primal experience that everybody's having at the same time, that the recording can at best try to imitate or duplicate. — Will Sheff

We always get back to old soul singers like Nina Simone, and how her recordings sound. Also new music like Tobacco, or people that use a mixture of analog and electronic music. — Jose Gonzalez

I was a beginner again. I practiced hard and used to listen very closely to recordings of American jazz drummers such as Tony Williams and Kenny Clarke. — Jamie Muir

When digital technology started becoming the norm, you've got 50, 60, 70 years of recordings on tapes that are just deteriorating. Like, a two-inch reel of recording tape won't last forever. It dissolves. It will disappear. — Dave Grohl

The Vikings certainly didn't write anything about themselves; it was not a literate, but rather a pagan, culture. So what we get was written later by Christian monks. But there were occasional reportings and recordings of people who had traded usually with the Vikings. — Michael Hirst

I feel that classical music should be a more recognizable part of everyone's entertainment. It has been my hope that through live concerts, motion pictures, recordings, international competitions, and interesting public forums, a larger group of people will learn to love classical music and attend live concert performances. — Jose Iturbi

Mozart's first work regarded today as a masterpiece, with its status confirmed by the number of recordings available, is his Piano Concerto No. 9, composed when he was twenty-one. That's certainly an early age, but we must remember that by then Wolfgang had been through eighteen years of extremely hard, expert training. — Geoff Colvin

The sound has grown and sweetened over the years as well, and you can hear it on many of my recordings and, most likely, will see and hear me playing it if you come to a live show. — Tom Chapin

You just go where poetry is, whether it's in your heart or your mind or in books or in places where there's live poetry or recordings. — Joy Harjo

I've been making the recordings for a long time, and I have tons and tons of them. I'm like a digital hoarder or something - everything is on like hard drives and whatever. — Julia Kent

Unlike the victims of the Jewish Holocaust, who were on the whole literate, comparatively wealthy, and positioned to record for history the horror that enveloped them, Cottenham and his peers had virtually no capacity to preserve their memories or document their destruction. The black population of the United States in 1900 was in the main destitute and illiterate. For the vast majority, no recordings, writings, images, or physical descriptions survive. There is no chronicle of girlfriends, hopes, or favorite songs of the dead in a Pratt Mines burial field. The entombed there are utterly mute, the fact of their existence as fragile as a scent in wind. — Douglas A. Blackmon

Duke Ellington's career traces the entire history of jazz. The repertoire associated with him contains the most important elements in the music and provides concrete examples of some of the best ways to present the music in the widest variety of settings-radio, TV, recordings, movies, concert halls, festivals, solo, small ensemble, big band, symphony orchestra, opera, Broadway shows ... You name it, he did it! — Billy Taylor

Private listening really took off in 1979, with the popularity of the Walkman portable cassette player. Listening to music on a Walkman is a variation of the "sitting very still in a concert hall" experience (there are no acoustic distractions), combined with the virtual space (achieved by adding reverb and echo to the vocals and instruments) that studio recording allows. With headphones on, you can hear and appreciate extreme detail and subtlety, and the lack of uncontrollable reverb inherent in hearing music in a live room means that rhythmic material survives beautifully and completely intact; it doesn't get blurred or turned into sonic mush as it often does in a concert hall. You, and only you, the audience of one, can hear a million tiny details, even with the compression that MP3 technology adds to recordings. You can hear the singer's breath intake, their fingers on a guitar string. That said, extreme and sudden dynamic changes can be painful on a personal music player. As — David Byrne

When you hear in the tape recordings Nixon's own voice saying, We have to stonewall, We have to lie to the Grand Jury, We have to pay burglars a million dollars, it's all too clear the horror of what went on. — Bob Woodward

Quite honestly, if I were doing work related to a living being or historical being where there was visual or audio recordings available, I would find that extremely difficult because I don't know how you would avoid the process of mimicry. And mimicry, to me at any rate, is a very dull prospect. — Daniel Day-Lewis

DUST includes rarities, demos, unreleased songs and instrumentals, live recordings, and more. — Adrian Belew

I used to think that all great recordings happened at about 3 A.M. — Tom Waits

I felt the need to distance myself from my problems, instead of dealing with them. My mother said It's not uncommon for people to run away from their fears to start somewhere new with a better attitude. — Documentary Recordings

The best songs don't get recorded; the best recordings don't get released; and the best releases don't get played. — Jim Dickinson

I never considered myself an Americana artist, but I'm a huge fan of old-time music from the States, the recordings that were made in the '20s and '30s. Trying to chase down the exact stylistic trappings of that stuff always felt like a dead end. That spirit of directness and economy, but also the poetic pungency of the writing and almost ugly, or raw, performance - all that seemed like the real message. I've just tried to somehow stay true to that feeling. — Will Sheff

I like home recordings and studio recordings just as much as each other - I don't think one is better - but for this record I wanted to see what I could do in a real studio with real producers. — Elliott Smith

Whether you've never meditated before or you've been doing it religiously for years, it is always good to evaluate (or re-evaluate) your practice. Although I've been meditating and teaching it for years, I still enjoy reading new information about it, learning new techniques, and checking out new meditation recordings. There is always something to learn because there are as many ways to meditate as there are people who are doing it. — Liberty Forrest

Sometimes in the past when I was going to perform a piece again I would listen to old recordings and try to reproduce the material. This time I realized that carrying around old information, trying to get everything in, and still be in the moment just doesn't work. — Meredith Monk

What does New York sound like? For me, the Charlie Parker at the Royal Roost recordings on the Savoy label are the total embodiment of the New York music experience. — Henry Rollins

I love making people sing. I love group singing, sacred harp singing, choral singing, recordings of people singing sea shanties, work songs, prison songs - how people just sang to get through things. — Matana Roberts

There are still many questions about how law enforcement responded to the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.To get some answers, media organizations, including NPR, have asked for tapes of the 911 calls and other recordings. So far, authorities have not released that audio, only edited transcripts. Doing more, they say, would re-victimize the survivors. — Audie Cornish

Well, in the sense that we do not tour or record together anymore - then I suppose not. But if our old recordings get heard more we shall be delighted. — Peter Asher

Before there were any sort of 'recordings' there was performance. If we are devolved back to the Stone Age tomorrow, there will be performance. — Todd Rundgren

Right now, I'm thinking in terms of just having a good band, man. Having a good act for the stage. Being a good performer, you know? Connected to that is future recordings, and future tunes, that kind of stuff. — Dan Hicks

The whole time I was with 'The Temptations', I was accumulating my own solo recordings. — Ali-Ollie Woodson