top of page
"The first music I was exposed to was Stravinsky and I loved it but I don't remember it."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Music quotes

"I think I first realized I wanted to be in country music and be an artist when I was 10. And I started dragging my parents to festivals, and fairs, and karaoke contests, and I did that for about a year before I came to Nashville for the first time. I was 11 and I had this demo CD of me singing Dixie Chicks and Leanne Rimes songs."

"Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder."

"When I first came to Nashville, people hardly gave country music any respect. We lived in old cars and dirty hotels, and we ate when we could."

"When there's music in your soul, there's soul in your music."

"Whether you listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug, or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own."
Explore more quotes by Leo Kottke

"There are nights when you can feel stale because you've fallen into a pattern by touring too much, but it's easy to get out of it by deliberately getting in trouble and playing yourself into a corner to then see if you can get out of it."

"I was required by Capital to release one every six months and the fastest I could do with all my touring was every nine months, and it would spook me every time because I never had what I needed and I really didn't want to do covers."

"It is not a mystical thing, however, it is obvious and practical and I think that what the performer does is to try to get to that point with every choice you make from the phrasing in a tune to the choice of tunes."

"The principle element in a performance is risk, and if you're losing interest then by scaring yourself to death the audience will feel it and boy it'll wake them up."

"It's true that the more you put in the more you get out and that has to be there I think, If you aren't really hooked on your instrument this job would be a hell on earth but if you are, it's the best."

"It was almost two years after I left Capital that I put out the first one on Chrysalis and that was really instructive because it was no better in particular than any other record I'd done."

"You can't really tell what the audience wants but you can tell what will keep everybodies attention in the same place."

"I am evidence that you don't have to sell a lot of records or succeed in the usual way to have a big audience and a job."

"That was when I found out that you could talk to them and it was a whole other way to blow your stack, and it's so much fun to perform that you want to do it again and the more you get out of it the better."

"I think that open tunings are a trap really because it's really hard not to sound like an open tuning when your using one and that gets old as well as what you learn in one open tuning is going to stay there."
bottom of page