Recordings Of 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

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

But I listen to live recordings of things that I did back in the '70s and then how I've done things since. And there's no doubt about it: if I compare the two, it's like chalk and cheese. — Rick Wakeman

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

When recordings replaced concerts as the dominant mode of hearing music, our conception of the nature of performance and of music itself was altered. — Charles Rosen

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

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

I got an amazing 10-CD set, it's the music that Alan Lomax recorded in Haiti in 1936. And what's incredible is how fantastic the drummers are and how off-the-grid they are. The liveliness is astonishing; they're just totally alive, these recordings. It's very interesting, to me, to be reminded of that, that there was a time when things were not that tight. — Brian Eno

I don't listen to recordings of my songs. I don't avoid it, I just don't go out of my way to do it. — Stephen Sondheim

Women do not like CDs of live music. We only like the original recordings. If a song sounds different from the version we fell in love with, then it's awful. — Leslie Mann

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

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

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

And if some self-proclaimed expert tells you that Martians are disembodied creatures of brain without emotion, let him listen to the recordings that were made of those cries, of victory, of vengeance, of exultation. 'Ulla! Ulla!' We — Stephen Baxter

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

In some of the greatest recordings ever made, the performance is a part of the recording. Dylan's 'Rainy Day Women No. 12 and 35' is all about the esthetic of that performance. You can hear the room. — Moby

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 think recordings have been a terrific advance because now, when you have a piece of music, particularly something that appears to the listener very complicated, there's really a push to the world to try to figure out what it was that he was hearing. — Leo Ornstein

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

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

Like sheet music when recordings came along - recordings are now becoming marginalised. CD sales are not declining because of piracy, but because CDs are the last hurrah of the electric age. — Anonymous

A big marker in my life was realizing you could record sound: I liked to make little recordings and then go back and listen to them. It becomes something outside of you then and you can listen to it objectively. — Josh Garrels

So, in the course of events, I had an opportunity to come in contact with Colin Matthews, through the Rex Foundation sponsoring recordings of various music that was being recorded over there. — Phil Lesh

Singles needed to come back. And what I tried to do in my online experiment was to change the rules for myself and make available at a more regular pace the fruits of my labour, for people who decided they wanted to support my recordings. — Todd Rundgren

My Dad died during the flu epidemic in 1918 when I was 4 years old. He left a lot of classical recordings behind that I began listening to at an early age, so he must have been a music lover. — Tom Glazer

'Cause I can make more money going in and doing my recordings and selling them through my entities that I have, rather than going to a record co. and them release a record and pay me 5 percent of what they make off it. — Mickey Gilley

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

The thing is, it really did take us too long to get these recordings done. We've had our rough times in the studio in the past, but after four weeks most of the material would have been recorded. This time it seemed like it just goes on and on. — Ed O'Brien

My favorite song as a boy was definitely 'Downtown' recorded by Petula Clark. I still love it! And the original cast recording of 'Gypsy'; I played my mother's cast recordings until there was no vinyl left. — Bryan Batt

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

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

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

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

I was devastated. I'm still devastated to this day. When talent like that disappears in a flash, you can't believe it. You deny it. Max Roach, who, of course, played with him on all those EmArcy recordings, held a concert in Baltimore for Clifford long after Clifford died. Max was still disbelieving so many years later. The concert was supposed to bring closure. But Max was so outrageously emotional that day. He had quite a few eruptions and was very emotional about what had happened so many years earlier. Like everyone, he remained disbelieving. — Helen Merrill

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 White House tapes, the recordings that Nixon made of his conversations in office, have long been recognized as a marvel of verbal incontinence. — Pankaj Mishra

To me, dance is so ethereal and elusive, so much of an illusion. After a performance, that's it. With vocals and music, you have good recordings. — Jamie Wyeth

Geography is crucial for my work. I went to Antarctica and took a studio to several of the main ice fields to make field recordings of ice to create a symphony - acoustic portraits of ice. — DJ Spooky

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

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

I finished the recordings I had started with Eleven. Matt Cameron joined for the rest of those sessions. — Jack Irons

We never got anything out of the recordings. I'm still as broke as I was when I was with the Mothers. — Jimmy Carl Black

I love the excess of Christmas. The shopping season that begins in September, the bad pop star recordings of Christmas carols, the decorations that don't know when to come down. — Mo Rocca

Let there be music in the home. If you have teenagers who have their own recordings, you will be prone to describe the sound as something other than music. Let them occasionally hear something better. Expose them to it. It will speak for itself. More of appreciation will come than you may think. It may not be spoken, but it will be felt, and its influence will become increasingly manifest as the years pass. — Gordon B. Hinckley

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

The best live recordings capture elements of surprise onstage. — M. Ward

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

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

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

My archive project is a multiedged sword. It is something I love doing, but it raises some questions about my motives in doing it. A writer accused me of building my archives just to further my own legend, whatever that is. I hope you don't believe that. What a shallow existence that would be! I remember reading that article saying that about me. It pissed me off. It's my life, and I am a collector. I collect everything: cars, trains, manuscripts, photographs, tape recordings, records, memories and clothes, to name a few. The fact that I want to create a chronological history of my recordings and supporting work is proof positive that I am an incurable collector, confronted with an amazingly detailed array of creations that I have painstakingly rat-holed over the years. — Neil Young

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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