T Bone Burnett Quotes
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I'm not going to get in to an argument with anyone about the relative merits of Judaism and Christianity, and what it means for a Jewish kid to be a Christian - I'm just not interested in that argument.
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I naturally wanted to be saved, so when I came home I told my mom I wanted to be confirmed. That's the way I related to it, being raised an Episcopalian. I went to Dallas and got confirmed.
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[Bob] Dylan began to incorporate things into that scene that were controversial then. He got shouted at in Newport when he played electric guitar, for instance. There was a certain purity that was sought among those people.
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I love loud music. I listen loud, and that's part of how I've learned how to do this. Record softly and play back loud and a whole other thing happens.
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The more perfect music we have, the more attractive the peculiarities and anomalies of human performance become. Perfection is a second rate idea.
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Listen, the story of the United States is this: One kid, without anything, walks out of his house, down the road, with nothing but a guitar and conquers the world. And we've done that again, and again, and again – Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Jimmy Rogers, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters.
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I figured out early on what I wanted to do.
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I want to write songs and play them for people - live.
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If it is true that we have a personal relationship with God, then that's enough for me.
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I'm not stupid enough to want to be famous. But I would like to be able to earn a living playing music.
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The internet has surrounded television and turned television into an art form.
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Music, for centuries and centuries, was used to teach everything. It was used to teach language, mathematics, history. The news was music. Everything traveled by song. It was used to teach ethics. It was used to create conscience, probably more than anything.
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In other words, I'd say the whole story of Bob Dylan is one man's search for God. The turns and the steps he takes to find God are his business. I think he went to a study group at the Vineyard, and it created a lot of excitement.
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I can tell for sure, the technologists have made it clear that they don't care about musicians. The arts have been sacrificed on the altar of technological advancement.
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Let the business take care of itself. If you get involved in the business, every hour that you're involved in business is an hour that you're not practicing. And every hour that you're not practicing is another hour further away from where you want to be.
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Probably the deepest use of music and of art is to create conscience.
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The essence of show business is, if you see a tight-rope walker go across a tight rope, everybody claps. But, if you see him wobble, everybody gasps.
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My original idea was to produce and not make records myself.
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People make art on the sides of buildings, and they'll make art on the sides of trains. They'll make art wherever they decide to make art. The technology that people are working with now will be replaced in 10 years, so that's not where your future is, if you're a musician.
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My advice for young people is that, if you want to be a musician, the thing to do is practice eight hours a day.
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We live in an age lit by lightnin'; after the flash, we're blind again.
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Technology changes nothing.
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Still, records are documents of a period of time. Most records are documents of two or three years, and I just approached it as a record I was doing over a 20-year period of time.
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I think, especially among the New York intelligentsia at that time, that there was a reason Bob Dylan went to New York to happen, because there was a culture developed there around the ideas of civil rights, around the idea of democracy growing out of Emerson and Thoreau, these ideas of the fanfare for the common man.
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If Picasso walked into Disney looking for a job, they would throw him out on the street. Couldn't draw good enough.
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I've seen a study in the last year that digital sound actually induces stress in the listener.
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Music was the medium through which knowledge was passed from generation to generation.
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Everything around a writer, or musician in the record business, probably everything in all the United States or in all of western civilization, is about competition.
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At different times in my life I met God from a different point of view.
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It's also ironic that in the old days of tape and tape hiss and vinyl records and surface noise, we were always trying to get records louder and louder to overcome that.
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