When all seems hopeless and all has gone silent, that’s Destiny turning down the music so that all may hear our response to life’s great storms, giving our response the chance to echo throughout eternity with the level of greatness it deserves.

I've been in auditions without screens, and I can assure you that I was prejudiced. I began to listen with my eyes, and there is no way that your eyes don't affect your judgement. The only true way to listen is with your ears and your heart. (p.251)

All these years the people said 'He’s acting like a kid.' He did not know he could not fly, so he did. Well he’s one of those that knows that life is just a leap of faith. So spread your arms, hold your breath and always trust your cape.

... Lightnin' Hopkins taught us, "the rubber on a wheel is faster than the rubber on a heel" and Muddy Waters taught us "you don't have to be the best one; just be a good 'un" .. that just about says it all, always strive to be a good 'un...

Quit the bitching on your blogAnd stop pretending art is hard.Just limit yourself to three chordsAnd do not practice daily.You’ll minimize some stranger’s sadnessWith a piece of wood and plastic.Holy fuck it’s so fantastic,Playing ukulele.

The music had ceased. Alex walked over to the gramophone, wound it up again, and put on more blues, a woman singing this time, gay and sad at once, like a stranded angel who had traded holiness for humanity but remembered what it used to be like to know God.

Well, normally I’m against big things. I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things. Too many things can go wrong when they get big.” — Pete Seeger (on how he felt about attending his big 90th birthday bash last year)

They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg’s early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.

By exchanging notes, you get to know one another, to understand one another. As if your souls were connected and your hearts were overlapping. It's a conversation through instruments. A miracle that creates harmony. In that moment, music transcends words.

Music? Music is life! It’s physical emotion - you can touch it! It’s neon ecto-energy sucked out of spirits and switched into sound waves for your ears to swallow. Are you telling me, what, that it’s boring? You don’t have time for it?

The dilemma of the eighth-grade dance is that boys and girls use music in different ways. Girls enjoy music they can dance to, music with strong vocals and catchy melodies. Boys, on the other hand, enjoy music they can improve by making up filthy new lyrics.

Pop is about the self in isolation, is non-collective. Even in a crowd screaming at the Beatles, Bay City Rollers or Boyzone, the focus is the externalisation of individual obsession, hormonally induced or otherwise. Pop is not a team sport. Pop is not soccer.

I remembered Owen telling me how music had saved him in Phoenix, that it drowned everything out, and it was the same for me now. As long as I had something to listen to, I could blur the things I didn't want to think about, if not block them out completely.

In the three minutes it takes the song to play I'm caught in a magic world of harmony and joy, a truly ecstatic joy, where the aching longing to be somewhere else, out of this city, out of this country, out of this body and out of this life, is kept at bay.

But the Beast was a good person...the Prince looked on the outside the way the Beast was on the inside. Sometimes people couldn't see the inside of the person unless they like the outside of a person. Because they hadn't learned to hear the music yet.