I am a friend when I need to be a friend, a father when I need to be a father, a musician when music calls. I switch roles accordingly.
A. R. Rahman
I joined the Madras Christian College but dropped out after three months. Telugu music director Ramesh Naidu asked me to assist him, and I did so for over a year. I did think of rejoining college, but by then, I was discovering the musician in me. I worked with Illaya Raja and Raj Koti and soon shifted to commercials. This led to movie offers.
A good film demands its own score, and if you are a musician, your conscience will never allow you to do something mediocre for a good film.
A musician is a professional, whether he or she is successful or not. The profession itself must be regarded as a stable job.
While my mother wanted me to be a musician, I wanted to become an electronic engineer.
I basically love classical music. I love a lot of musicians playing together and the whole culture of that, whether it's Indian or it's Western.
Big Red Machine is really a community effort: I guess it involves almost 30 musicians. It does come out of our friendship, but it's really something that is deeply collaborative.
Aaron Dessner
The National's favorite experiences as musicians are when we are collaborating with people a little outside of our world as a band.
I think for me to be involved in a festival, there has to be a strong element of songwriting and musicianship.
One of the hardest things about being a musician is finishing a project and then having to wait three or six months to publish it and to do all the sort of promotional behaviour.
My grandfather, Arthur Baskerville, he played and still plays a little bit piano and trombone, and so when I was a kid, I always heard jazz around the house, but I also went to his gigs, whether it be a Saturday brunch in my hometown Columbus, Ohio. We'd go and hear him play with some of the local musicians.
Aaron Diehl
I'm not saying that in order to be a great jazz musician you have to be a great classical pianist first. But I am saying that it makes things easier when you can get around the instrument, and you have some idea of how to approach the various hurdles.
I've always loved music and held it as a sacred thing that I can't touch, as I don't really want to deconstruct it or be a musician.
Aaron Koblin
Anyone who's got a guitar, you like to pick it up. I can play a couple of songs, some '50s rock and roll, a bit of Elvis. That's it, really - I'm not a musician, I'm not a singer.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson
Whenever I visited China in the past, the relationships always felt superficial; there was no time where I felt those moments of conflict and delight that make you feel close to another person. But since I started touring there in 2004, I would always collaborate with local musicians, and that opened up a new level of intimacy.
Abigail Washburn
I'm no ethnomusicologist. There is a connection between the five-note scale used both in traditional Chinese music and the blues, but I don't really understand it. All I know is, whenever I play with Chinese musicians, we seem to belong to the same musical gene pool.
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.
Abraham Maslow
It's always great playing with other musicians. It's also a great situation where I'm the older guy, I've influenced generations of guitar players.
Ace Frehley
Billy Joel is an incredible musician. He just feels like one of the guys, you know. I grew up listening to his music.
Action Bronson
Everybody wants to be a rapper - even country musicians.
Ad-Rock
We never thought we were musicians. We just thought we were in a band.
There's a lot of older musicians who say your whole life making music, you're really trying to get back to that first couple of things you liked when you were a kid. And as much as you might like to think you're not, you really are.
America has not produced a more salient political musician than Gil Scott-Heron.
Musicians don't respect a lot of the stuff that is on TRL and a lot of musicians think that stuff on the radio is not good musically so when musicians say that they like us it obviously feels good.
I never said that I wanted to be an actor when I was a kid. I didn't know. I thought I was going to be a singer and musician. That's what I had been doing, for a huge part of my life.
I like having my hair and face done, but I'm not going to lose weight because someone tells me to. I make music to be a musician not to be on the cover of Playboy.
Also, I'd like to play an athlete again, while I'm still physically fit, or a musician, like Nat King Cole, because I play the trumpet and sing. I'd like to incorporate that into a character.
Rahul Jaykar, my character in 'Aashiqui 2,' was a talented musician battling his demons, while Noor Nizami, my character in 'Fitoor,' is an artist who spends his entire life in pursuit of the love of his muse, Firdaus.
Northeastern folk music influenced me from a very young age. Sachin Dev Burman is one of the inspirational musicians in Indian film music. The way he fused folk music with his signature style is amazing. So, I am aware of the beauty of northeast folk music.
There is nothing more beautiful for a musician to listen and see harmony.
As a musician, to be part of anything that promotes peace is very rewarding.
Apart from being a playback singer for films, I'm also an independent musician.
I can't do too much musical movement with a lot of MC's, because they don't know how to follow me. But with Souls of Mischief, I could go anywhere because they are musicians - they rap as musicians, and they play instruments and produce, so they get that.
I don't do anything digital. Everything is analog, and that's a limitation for me. However, in my world, it's not a limitation at all because I don't create the type of music that would generally be created by musicians that work with digital recording studios, and/or digital equipment, as far as production is concerned.
Musicians are all about celebrity first and foremost, and I just can't do it. The second any sort of popularity contest comes into the picture, I have to walk in the other direction. These people are sociopaths.
Having some decent musicians around you only expands what you can do production-wise, but I make rap - I can't really see myself doing much else.
I think I'm always surprised at how much the musicians I meet put weight on things that aren't music.
MCs are authors, and rock musicians who write lyrics are authors, to a degree.
I'm a producer for fun. I'm not a professional schooled musician or anything.
I'm a DJ, but I'm also a ridiculously high-grossing musician due to doing productions.
I make documentaries from time to time to remind myself of reality. It's like musicians doing scales to keep their fingers working: when you're in the street, listening to people, you're forced to be in the service of your subject.
The Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame will provide a center where the lives and the artistry of the greatest jazz musicians will be celebrated, and where people will come to learn about jazz, something to which my brother devoted his life's work.
I always want to set myself a challenge by doing something no-one would expect me to do! But, having said that, I don't feel as a musician you can steer too far away from what you normally do.
That's Tommy, this great producer who comes in contact with people and must have a mental library of personnel who are great for this and great for that, and he brought this whole group of musicians to the project that I'd never worked with before.
I have always made commercial music. The people who vote for the Grammy nominees are mostly in their 40s and have other jobs or are musicians themselves. They like music that they can relate to - they like commercial music.
My father was a painter. There was a lot of singing. We hung around with a lot of folk musicians. My family knew a lot of great folk musicians of the time, like Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Leadbelly. They were all people we knew.
I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading. So I made an economic decision, and it turned out the best judgment I ever made in my life.
I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading.
I did write a lot of TV themes - I wrote about 45 of them, and a couple of which are still reference and popular today, like 'Diff'rent Strokes' and 'Facts of Life.' But I was a limited musician.
I'm really clear about what my life mission is now. There's no more depression or lethargy, and I feel like I've returned to the athlete I once was. I'm integrating all the parts of me - jock, musician, writer, poet, philosopher - and becoming stronger as a result.
