I’ve rarely seen video screens used well in a music concert.

A good song never gets old.

The sound and music are 50% of the entertainment in a movie.

I feel like in my music I can be a rebel. I can say things I wouldn’t say in real life.

My songwriting is like extending a hand to the listener.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don’t really know what we’re doing and when we do, it doesn’t seem to help.

Philosophy is the highest music.

I wish I could make music about politics. I feel like it’s such an art and a talent that I admire tremendously, but when I step into the studio, I step out of the real world, and it’s therapeutic.

The great moments of rock ‚n‘ roll were never off in some corner of the music world, in a self-constructed ghetto.

I really am a fan of Ye’s music.

Rhythm is something you either have or don’t have, but when you have it, you have it all over.

I can dance to just about anything.

I owe everything to Nirvana. But I can’t let that overshadow the future. For the first few years, I didn’t even want to talk about Nirvana. Partly because it was just painful to talk about losing Kurt but also because I wanted the Foo Fighters to mean something.

I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.

The instrument that I never learned how to play was my fans. You know, they are the part of the story that nobody teaches you. I just want to do the right thing; I want to be a voice with them, among them.

I think ‚Invisible‘ is a great song, but I don’t know how accessible it is.

I’m the king of the anthems.

I won’t be satisfied until people want to hear me sing without looking at me. Of course, that doesn’t mean I want them to stop looking.

Instruments sound interesting, not because of their sound, but because of the relationship a player has with them. Instrumentalists build a rapport with their instruments, which is what you like and respond to.

People tried to change my concept of what music is. That music is work, but it’s not like that.

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

There are certain sounds that I’ve found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.

I want to thank The Beatles for almost single-handedly getting me out of writer’s block.

I always wanted to operate at the highest altitude, just in terms of hip-hop and the music.

If you want to find the source of much of the music of modern day Russia, you will find it in the incredible compositions of that crazed lunatic Berlioz.

I love music, and after my first experience with movies, I can’t wait to do more.

It’s easy to make an album full of great songs. But I want people to go for the ride. The songs have to make sense together.

When I was born, that was the music my mother was listening to. Michael Jackson is a third parent to me.

People are already finding ways to make their music and play it in front of people and have a life in music, I guess, and I think that’s pretty much all you can ask.

You can write a song about being in love with someone, but you don’t have to be in love with anyone.

Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

‚Jolene‘ has been very popular all of these years, even overseas.

I started playing violin in the 5th grade. They had a program in school where you could get out of class to go play instruments. So I raised my hand, left out of class, me and a bunch of my homeboys, just to get out of class for that day. They asked what instrument you wanted to play and I picked the violin.

My mother knew how to read music and everything. But I just kinda learned off of records. And so, I was listening to records and I’d play ‚em over and over.

Madonna, I think, is the greatest visual musical artist that we’ve ever had. If you look at her photo log, the photographers that she was able to work with throughout her career framed her in the proper way. It was the proper context. It was that visual that made sure that everything was gonna cut through in a certain way.

If this were all to go away tomorrow, all the big success, I would still be very happy going from bar to bar playing music for people.

The thing that will never go away is that connection you make with a band or a song where you’re moved by the fact that it’s real people making music. You make that human connection with a song like ‚Let It Be‘ or ‚Long and Winding Road‘ or a song like ‚Bohemian Rhapsody‘ or ‚Roxanne,‘ any of those songs. They sound like people making music.

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around – the music and the ideas.

I always had a knack for improvisation. I can write down the notes I play, but never really had a proper academic musical background. I suppose I’m blessed and cursed by the fact I have that freedom.

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

It was like being in the eye of a hurricane. You’d wake up in a concert and think, Wow, how did I get here?

I always say this about my music, and music in general: Music is like a time capsule. Each album reflects what I’m going through or what’s going on in my life at that moment.

I don’t know which will go first – rock ‚n‘ roll or Christianity.

I think I don’t take myself too seriously. You know as far as, it’s a fun life. I take my music serious, but I like to have fun.

While musical experts of the world focus on what choir members can do, I would like to focus on what choir members can be.

I wanted to be in a punk band before I had even heard any punk music.

My music definitely comes from a place of experience. Everything connects to a truth.

I look out at the stadiums full of people and see them all knowing the words to songs I wrote. And curling their hair! I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It’s just funny. And wonderful.

I love to play. And fortunately, I don’t know a lot of musicians that suck. I know a bunch of really good ones, and they’re always up for playing.

I don’t know if it’s changing already with ‚Joanne,‘ but my intention is to bring people together that don’t know each other and that would maybe feel awkward, but somehow be brought together by the music. That’s what I wanted to do. Because that is pure and authentic to my family history and what I stand for.

I always say, you gotta play a dive bar like you play an arena, and you play an arena like you play a dive bar.

When I listen to music these days, and I hear Pro Tools and drums that sound like a machine – it kinda sucks the life out of music.

I think that the idea of having a different approach to every single one of my albums is so exciting to me. I never want to make the same record twice. Why do it? What’s the point?

‚Kiss Land‘ wasn’t about what people wanted to hear on the radio. It was the state of mind I was in – introverted, like David Cronenberg’s ‚Naked Lunch.‘ You didn’t know if you were hearing a chorus or a verse. It was just my thoughts.

Music is my shining light, my favorite thing in the world. T get me to stop doing it for one second would be difficult!

I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.

I know people said I wasn’t selling out in America, but that was entirely untrue. We sold out all over the world, and every night I looked out into the fans and those front rows that you’re talking about, the tears, the honesty, the inability to not be completely overjoyed because they felt accepted.

You listen to Charlie Parker or John Coltrane before they found their voice, they sounded different. And when you listen to them after they found their voice on their instruments, they sound more confident and in control. Artists have that, too.

Obviously this song is an achievement for me in my career, but what makes me really feel good is to make Latinos feel proud. To provoke that pride that a pop figure and someone so big in music globally like Drake would sing with me completely in Spanish and create this hit ‚MIA.‘ That’s the best part of it.

I always hated how I looked on camera. I never put a face to my music, which actually made the music that much more mysterious.