Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back, and, instead of bleeding, he sings.
Rock-and-roll starts between the legs and goes through the heart, then to the head. As long as it does those three things, it’s a great rock song.
Country music is three chords and the truth.
Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don’t take it too seriously.
I am all for singing. If I had had children, I should have hounded them into choirs and choral societies, and if they weren’t good enough for that, I would have sent them out, to sing in the streets.
A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.
Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart, and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.
Jews and blacks come from the same history. . . . We’ve just expressed our suffering differently as people. Blacks developed the blues. Jews complain; we just never thought of putting it to music.
The Qabalists believed that the universe was created from sound. Thus by reciting sacred sounds, changes or transformations of matter could take place. Healing could simply consist of reinvoking those sacred sounds in the body. . . . Perhaps this is what the shamans do when they chant.
A religious life is a struggle and not a hymn.
I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession, let alone two years or ten years. If you can, then it ain’t music, it’s close-order drill or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.
I’d rather be dead than singing “Satisfaction” when I’m forty-five.
I wrote a song, but I can’t read music, so I don’t know what it is. Every once in a while I’ll be listening to the radio, and I say, “I think I might have written that.”
Everything too stupid to be said is sung.
Aldous Huxley suggested that the psalm-singing of Christian and Buddhist monks, the chanting of medicine men and shamans, and the shouting and screaming of revivalists for hours on end bring about an increase in the carbon-dioxide level, triggering an altered state.
Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music.
I’ve always held the song in high regard because songs have got me through so many sinks of dishes and so many humiliating courting events.
There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something, we’d all love one another.
There is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord. . . . I have never seen anything to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, fill a church, causing the church, as Leadbelly and so many others have testified, to “rock.”
Because of her singing they all went away feeling moved, feeling comforted, feeling, perhaps, the slightest tremors of faith.
How come you can hear a chord, and then another chord, and then your heart breaks open?
