Big companies are like marching bands. Even if half the band is playing random notes, it still sounds kind of like music. The concealment of failure is built into them.
I feel that bands can do whatever they want, after all, they own themselves and the artmusic they create.
I think some bands thrive on the idea of changing instruments. When they're off their real instrument, the ability to go very far from the original idea is reduced.
I don't like meeting bands that I like, because in the slight case that they might not be cool, it kind of ruins it for me.
I had gone full-on folkie; I'd had it with bands.
People are being more experimental. I hear chords being played that really haven't been on the radio. I love that. I go to my kids' school and see kids playing in bands. It is a sign of what's to come.
I grew up in the '80s and '90s listening to Public Enemy and Mobb Deep and the Smashing Pumpkins. I don't even know what it was like in the '60s - I wasn't alive then - so the Mayer Hawthorne sound is taking what I can learn from the classics, and blending it with my hip-hop DJ and producer background and punk-rock bands that I played in as a kid.
I always hate people that complain about showbiz after they've had a good run. To me there are so many great bands that never get their due, that are struggling away. And I'm like, if you hit the lottery, man, you can't expect it to come around every time.
Rock 'n' roll accepted me and paid me, even though I loved the big bands I went that way because I wanted a home of my own. I had a family. I had to raise them. Let's don't leave out the economics. No way.
So many bands write about the same s -. It gets real boring after a while.
Being in Nirvana was amazing an experience that will never happen again for me. And I look on them as some of the best and worst times of my life. But we're in this band, the Foo Fighters, making music for the love of music. We all came from bands that had disbanded, and we were drawn to each other because we missed playing - we missed getting in the van, loading our equipment, and watching it break down in the middle of a show. And that feeling hasn't gone away. There's nothing I'd rather do than make music. It's the love of my life.
James, that's a bad situation. I'm not saying it's not repairable, but it's pretty far. When you go from being in one of the best bands in the world to some cover band. . . as far as I'm concerned, he was playing down at the pub.
I wasn't in a lot of rock and roll bands. I was in jug bands and things when I was in school.
There's a difference between music that's original and music that's retro. A lot of bands now are kind of retro 70s whether it's Kraut-rock or. . . I've heard people suggest that we're kind of retro 80s.
I started as a drummer, so I sort of took on singing duties by default. I had sung backgrounds and some lead vocals from behind the drums in different bands that I'd been in, and I'd gotten great responses for the songs I would sing. I really started pursuing the possibility of being a lead singer based on the fact that I was working a full-time restaurant job and then playing gigs at night, hauling drums around. One day, it just dawned on me that, 'Hey, I could be in a band and be the singer, and it would be a lot easier!'
Everybody needs some real rock in their lives. . . whether it's bands like ourselves, Aerosmith or Stones. . . or new bands like Five Finger Death Punch, Avenged Sevenfold. . . it's out there.
All the classic bands that have been around forever, they came up gradually.
Early on, before rock 'n' roll, I listened to big band music - anything that came over the radio - and music played by bands in hotels that our parents could dance to. We had a big radio that looked like a jukebox, with a record player on the top. The radiorecord player played 78rpm records. When we moved to that house, there was a record on there, with a red label. It was Bill Monroe, or maybe it was the Stanley Brothers. I'd never heard anything like that before. Ever. And it moved me away from all the conventional music that I was hearing.
Texas is a hotbed of insanely good bands and musicians.
I began with dance, doing ballet at 3, then tap, jazz, modern. Then I sang in church choirs, learned how to play clarinet and drums, sang with rock bands and only then did I get into musical theatre.