Punk Rock is about freedom, it’s not about your chart position, and I’ll sing any fucking song I want.

– Patti Smith (The Defiant Ones, Ep1)

Bagpipes. They’re not just Scottish, Celtic or Irish. There are Caledonian ones and Spanish ones and Middle Eastern ones. Wherever you have a goat and you have a piece of wood, all I want to say is the goat better watch out because it’s probably going to end up being a bagpipe.

– Hans Zimmer On Creating the Dune Soundtrack.

… I realized that the mistake was that I thought I wanted to be in a band. What I should have been thinking about was wanting to play music.

– Ian MacKaye

“How would you record (Patton’s) vocals back then?”

“Uh, I dunno. A microphone?”

– Matt Wallace. full in bloom Interview

“When it’s a struggle, it means you know what you really want to do but you’re fighting what you think you should do.”

– Kenny Aronoff on making an important decision: – Sunset Sound Roundtable

Paul Simon explaining how he composed Bridge Over Troubled Water to Dick Cavett.

Paul : “I was stuck there.”
Cavett: “What makes you stuck?”
Paul: “Everywhere I went, led me where I didn’t want to be; so I was stuck.”

– Paul Simon on the Dick Cavett show.

The thing is, there is room for all of it. There’s room for trashy pop music, there’s room for electronics. I mean, when people say: “I don’t like this this kind of music, I don’t like that kind of music”. Well fine. You don’t have to listen to it, but there’s still no reason why it shouldn’t exist. There’s room for all of it.

– Michael Beinhorn – The Significance of Pre-Production. PLaP.

Punk rock and metal is a slippery slope … You start with something like the Ramones and go, Wow, now I want something faster! And then you get to DRI and it’s, Wow, I want something noisier! And then you get to Voivod and it’s, I want something crazier! And pretty soon you wind up listening to white noise and thinking it’s the greatest thing ever!

– Dave Grohl; Mojo Interview

I’ve done football commercials; I’ve done everything; commercial and noncommercial: My attitude has been that they’re both the same. Why is it better to get a check every week from a university than to get royalties? Of course I’m a sellout. What else would I be?

– Phil Glass; New York Times.