The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.

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

Meditation is a state of mind which looks at everything with complete attention, totally, not just parts of it. And no one can teach you how to be attentive. If any system teaches you how to be attentive, then you are attentive to the system, and that is not attention.

The most miraculous process is watching a song go from a tiny idea in the middle of the night to something that 55,000 people are singing back to you.

It’s not true I had nothing on, I had the radio on.

There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It’s always been my way of expressing what, for me, is inexpressible by any other means.

I want my fans to love themselves. It’s almost like I want to hypnotize them so when they hear my music they love themselves instantly.

Music is the melody whose text is the world.

If people take anything from my music, it should be motivation to know that anything is possible as long as you keep working at it and don’t back down.

I’m a big fan of songs like Joe Cocker’s ‚You Are So Beautiful‘ and Eric Clapton’s ‚Wonderful Tonight‘ – songs that go straight to the point.

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

I tried to give the world a bit of creativity, lyrics. And for me, I will always represent music from Puerto Rico, reggaeton, Latin music.

Music has to be sort of ignorable sometimes.

Nothing feels better than going onstage and everybody is singing every word – and actually wanting to see you.

U2’s best work has always been when we didn’t know what we’re doing.

As a songwriter, you respect and appreciate the writings of other people, and I often get asked, are there songs out there I wish I’d written? Yes. There’s many of them!

I don’t know if I ever feel totally great about a record when I put it out. With every record that I put out, someone has literally got to come pry it from me because when I listen to my own music, I just hear flaws in it.

It’s not essential for me to have a big debut week; it’s not essential for me to have big radio records.

A song is anything that can walk by itself.

Software options proliferate extremely easily – too easily, in fact – because too many options create tools that can’t ever be used intuitively. Intuitive actions confine the detail work to a dedicated part of the brain, leaving the rest of one’s mind free to respond with attention and sensitivity to the changing texture of the moment.

A lot of people from my generation of music are so focused on playing things correctly or to perfection that they’re stuck in that safe place.

I’m not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down.

I never thought, in my lifetime, that you’d be able to watch movies, read books and listen to music from a phone, but I guess the technology of tomorrow is here today.

I love the song ‚I Hope You Dance‘ by Lee Ann Womack. I was going to write that song, but someone beat me to it.

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.

I don’t know how to function without music. When I’m not making it, I’m listening to it. It gives me courage and takes care of my mind.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know and all of heaven we have hear below.

I would love to get Rihanna on a Khaled song. That’s my friend, but every time I’m around her, I get shy.

I don’t think I’d ever make an album of just covers because I love writing my own music.

Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

I made an album I’m very proud of, and that’s about it.

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.

Because you have things like ‚American Idol‘ and you’ve got radio stations that play music made entirely by computers, it’s easy to forget there are bands with actual people playing actual instruments that rock.

I don’t like to feel like I’m in a club when I’m in my car and I turn on the radio. Anything that ceases to be a song and just sounds like house music kind of stresses me out.

I’ve always loved black culture; I don’t know any other way to put it. Since I was a kid I loved music and early jazz, Sly and the Family Stone. I’m older – I’m in my early 50s – so you’ll have to excuse me. That was always very exciting to me to connect to the culture on that level.

If you pour your life into songs, you want them to be heard. It’s a desire to communicate. A deep desire to communicate inspires songwriting.

I can dance to just about anything.

Whatever position I occupied, it was the result of colleagues – of my comrades in the movement – who had decided in their wisdom to use me for the purpose of focusing the attention of the country and the international community on me.

Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.

The basis of our partnership strategy and our partnership approach: We build the social technology. They provide the music.

Searching for music is like searching for God. They’re very similar. There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year, and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year.

I don’t know how the rap game is, because I’m a fan of reality, and the rap game’s entertainment.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

People – especially white people – they want me to be a role model just because of the life I lead. The things I say in my songs, they expect it of me.

When I joined Nirvana, I was the fifth or sixth drummer – I don’t know if they’d ever had a drummer they were totally happy with. And they were strangers. There was never much of a deeper connection outside of the music.

I wish I could tell you me and my rock band were traveling around, strung out. No, we were a family band. Straight Partridge Family.

I remember talking with Arcade Fire after their first record, when they were getting all kinds of offers from major labels, and I don’t think I gave them any advice. They survived that whole onslaught pretty well anyway without me.

The simple act of paying attention can take you a long way.

As long as my music is real, it’s no limit to how many ears I can grab.

If it’s illegal to rock and roll, throw my ass in jail!

I could sing you a thousand and one doo-wop songs. I love the simplicity in that music. It’s not super-poetic, it’s just from the heart.

I wish myself to be a prop, if anything, for my songs. I want to be the vehicle for my songs. I would like to colour the material with as much visual expression as is necessary for that song.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Rock ‚n‘ roll is ridiculous. It’s absurd. In the past, U2 was trying to duck that. Now we’re wrapping our arms around it and giving it a great big kiss.

I used to consider the listener. But now I’m in a space where, if I’m not inspired, I can’t really do the music. I can’t feel it.

I love making music. That’s what I love to do. So I don’t feel like there’s any need to take a break unless I want to.

Give whatever you are doing and whoever you are with the gift of your attention.

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don’t set out to say anything very important.