Van Morrison Quotes (44 Quotes)


    Soul singer Solomon Burke got his career revival with 2002's Don't Give Up on Me, ... Stepchild.

    Even today, skiffle is a defining part of my music. If I get the opportunity to just have a jam, skiffle is what I love to play.

    In I Forgot That Love Existed, ... If my heart could do the thinking And my head begin to feel Then I'd look upon the world anew And know what's truly real.

    I just need somewhere to dump all my negativity.

    I don't feel comfortable doing interviews. My profession is music, and writing songs. That's what I do. I like to do it, but I hate to talk about it.


    10. Cleaning Windows ... Live at the Grand Opera House Belfast.

    I went back to Belfast and started a club, the Maritime. No one had thought about doing a blues club, so I was the first.

    It was really strange for me when I started to play concerts in America where the audiences were all sitting down.

    As a developing musician, skiffle became a platform for me to start playing music.

    If you're a pop singer, you don't need to evolve. You just get a set together, have some hit songs and play them over and over.

    I'd love to live in Ireland but I'd like to live as me, not what someone thinks I am. People don't understand - I lived there before I was famous.

    When I started you were more in touch with the people you were playing to. There wasn't the distance or the separation that there is now.

    There is no black-and-white situation. It's all part of life. Highs, lows, middles.

    I always record far more than I can use. There's probably twice as much recorded as comes out.

    Large audiences did not suit my low-key approach.

    A famous person to themselves, they don't get up in the morning and think, I'm famous. I'm not famous to me. Famous is a perception.

    Being famous was extremely disappointing for me. When I became famous it was a complete drag and it is still a complete drag.

    When I started studying tenor saxophone as a kid in Belfast, I did so with a guy named George Cassidy, who was also a big inspiration.

    I never bought the commercial thing, at any stage of the game.

    Every performance is different. That's the beauty of it.

    You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.

    I understood jazz, I understood how it worked. That's what I apply to everything.

    I think Paul McGuinness and U2 created the Irish music industry. It certainly wasn't there before that.

    Skiffle was a name that was attached to what was, in essence, American folk music with a beat.

    I don't think nostalgia has to be negative.

    These days politics, religion, media seem to get all mixed up. Television became the new religion a long time back and the media has taken over.

    There's always got to be a struggle. What else is there? That's what life is made of. I don't know anything else. If there is, tell me about it.

    I do see value in music criticism. Most of the criticism I have received over the years has been very good.

    In order to win you must be prepared to lose sometime. And leave one or two cards showing.

    You can't stay the same. If you're a musician and a singer, you have to change, that's the way it works.

    I've never felt like I was born with a silver spoon at all, although I've felt like howling at the moon a lot of times!

    The future is keeping you out of the present time.

    The first piece of music that captured my imagination was probably Ray Charles Live At Newport.

    I educated myself. To me, school was boring.


    I never paid attention to what was contemporary or what was commercial, it didn't mean anything to me.

    You've got to separate the singer and the songs.

    I'm not a rock singer and I don't want to be a rock singer. I'm not interested. It doesn't seem to get across.

    My ambition when I started out was to play two or three gigs a week. And that's what I'm doing.

    I learnt from Armstrong on the early recordings that you never sang a song the same way twice.

    I write songs. Then, I record them. And, later, maybe I perform them on stage. That's what I do. That's my job. Simple.

    If it's what you do and you can do it, then you do it.

    The point of jazz is, you do something and then you go on.

    I'm very lucky, I'm happy with life because my experiences led me to do what I had to do. I don't have any regrets whatsoever.


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