Music Quotes

I'll go to the movies and hear 'Angel From Montgomery' in some film, and nobody ever even told me about it. They don't tell you your stuff is going to be in a movie. They don't have to, so they don't tell you. You get paid eventually.

Soon as I could play one guitar chord and laid my ear upon that wood, I was gone. My soul was sold. Music was everything from then on.

The scientific nature of the ordinary man is to go out and do the best you can.

I think the more the listener can contribute to the song, the better; the more they become part of the song, and they fill in the blanks. Rather than tell them everything, you save your details for things that exist. Like what color the ashtray is. How far away the doorway was. So when you're talking about intangible things like emotions, the listener can fill in the blanks and you just draw the foundation.

Bewildered, bewildered, you have no complaint. You are what you are, and you ain't what you ain't.

I don't like to see Christmas trees torn down.

Now Jesus, he don't like killing, no matter what the reason is for, and your flag decal won't get you into heaven anymore.

I always knew Gordon Lightfoot was a really great songwriter, but his stuff even sounds better and better all the time. It's just so really good to me. It's just like that's what should be in a dictionary, you know, next to a really good contempory folk song, is a Gordon Lightfoot song.

In my songs, I try to look through someone else's eyes, and I want to give the audience a feeling more than a message.

I just like a good, sad song. The sadder, the better. It moves me.

The Ways of a Woman in Love' is one of my very favorite early Johnny Cash songs. I like the way the lyric talks about the character walking by the girl's house and wishing he was the one in her arms.

Sam Stone' is a song about futility.

Howie Epstein was a kind, patient, and extremely talented musician. He took two years out of his life and dedicated his undivided attention to the making of two of my records. Those records changed my life thanks to Howie.

I just tried to come up with some honest songs. What I was writing about was real plain stuff that I wasn't sure was going to be interesting to other people. But I guess it was...I've never had any discipline whatsoever. I just wait on a song like I was waiting for lightning to strike. And eventually-usually sometime around 3 in the morning-I'll have a good idea. By the time the sun comes up, hopefully, I'll have a decent song.

Hunter can write a melody and stuff like that, but his forte is lyrics. He can write a serviceable melody to hang his lyrics on, and sometimes he comes up with something really nice.

If you assume you haven't learned anything yet, there's no reason your playing can't stay dynamic all your life.

I think The Grateful Dead kind of represents the spirit of being able to go out and have an adventure in America at large.

You can't just play the way The Grateful Dead plays without working at it. It's not something that is easy or just happened to us. There was a long, slow process that brought that into being.

Magic is what we do, music is how we do it.

I listen to anything anyone gives me. I always go back to a few basic favorites. I can always listen to Django Reinhardt and hear something I haven't heard before. I like to listen to Art Tatum and Coltrane and Charlie Parker. Those are guys who never seem to run out of ideas.