For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.
I see all the musicians in Blur with equal standing, really.
Glenn Hughes is one of the most naturally talented musicians, but he's still copying Steve Wonder to this day, so I can't call him a bona fide member of Deep Purple.
I wasn't sure if I wanted to try the retro style in the first place, because many musicians have left masterpieces in the genre, and I felt burdened by this.
A Cat Stevens record isn't just Cat Stevens' ideas. It's Cat Stevens and all the musicians who play with Cat Stevens, right?
Various different people have inspired me throughout my career. From Francis Bacon to Vassareli, Coco Chanel to Christian Dior, Cecil Beaton, musicians, architects... the list is endless.
Why do musicians give so much time to charitable causes? The most humanitarian cause that we can give our time to is the creation and performance of music itself.
I grew up with all these old jazz guys in the '70s in L.A., and they grew up idolizing Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Lester Young - all of these incredible musicians.
I don't have to compete in the charts. I can just be myself as a musician, a songwriter and play with the musicians that I really love.
Even though it's become a really cliched thing to see musicians working for charity, it's still effective and it still has to be done.
There have been many great musicians that, Clifford Brown is one great example, I mean he died very early, 25.
My favorite band is Yes. They are all phenomenal musicians, and yes, this means I'm subject to ridicule from co-workers and occasionally from my wife, three kids, and even our Labradoodle pup.
With 'Light,' I collaborated with a lot of different producers and musicians I respected, and we all wrote and worked on material which I then took to an old-school producer, David Kahne, and we put it all together. The lyrics came first - they were written before the music.
I think Phil Collins is one of the most underrated musicians, singers, performers - he is absolutely amazing, I think, and I think he's probably got a bit of a rough ride occasionally because he became so mainstream and so popular.
A respectable-sized audience hasn't really been able to follow developments in jazz since the free jazz movement in the '60s. Some of them can't even get with John Coltrane. Audiences are diminishing more and more rapidly. Some of the top young musicians with something new to say can't get record companies to put out their stuff.
I don't take compliments very easily. I think most musicians suffer from low self-esteem to some extent.
I am compared to other classical musicians, but most of them perform songs from other people, and most of those composers belong to another era.
A lot of people assume that musicians are comrades by nature. It's cutthroat like anything else.
Haute couture is like an orchestra, for which only Balenciaga is the conductor. The rest of us are just musicians, following the directions he gives us.
The intensity of being in front of all these incredible musicians and tremendous conductors in these elaborate halls can be overwhelming.