Composers From The United States

"So she prays for a prankster and lust in the marriage bed And he waits till she can give And he waits and he waits."

"Is it sweet, your sting?"

"Say a word to the hangman for me, me and my baby."

"Just having thoughts of Marianne, quickest girl in the frying pan."

"You thought that you were the bomb, yes well so did I."

"I have got my rape hat on, honey, but I always could accessorize."

"Nothing's gonna stop me from floating."

"I found the secret to life; I'm okay when everything is not okay"

"It was me And a gun And a manOn my back But I haven't seen Barbados so I must get out of this"

"I've got a cat named Easter; he says, 'Will you ever learn? You're just an empty cage, girl, if you kill the bird.'"

"Got enough guilt to start my own religion."

"Just what God needs: one more victim. Why do we crucify ourselves?"

"An angel's face is tricky to wear constantly."

"You could taste heaven perfectly."

"And I rode along side Till you lost me there In the open road And I rode along side Till the honey spread Itself so thin For me to break your bread For me to take your word I had to steal it."

"The intention is to tell a story, to create a sonic world for us, a sonic painting, for us to walk into, without having to see her. She's transcending that. She's choosing to transcend that. And that's a very powerful thing to do."

"I just remember pulling aside, I was driving, and I heard it on the radio, in the states — and she didn't really get played a lot in the states, until that song — that really got played — a lot. I remember, I had to pull over, and listen to it, because I'd never heard anything like it."

"Babooshka's just one of those song's you just can't get out of your head, can you? You know, how she just takes a word, and you start seeing images and pictures. To a word that maybe you haven't used … it's "Babooshka" and she's turned that into an emotion, that's just how she's able to use a combination of a word and a combination of a melody and the rhythm of that, and it creates a new language."

"Beck's bass player (Justin Meldal-Johnsen) suggested I do a cover of Slayer's 'Raining Blood," she says applying strawberry lip balm with her pinkie. "I was reading about what was going on in Afghanistan--the way women were being oppressed, the destruction of religious statues. And when i heard that song, i just imagined a huge juicy vagina coming out of the sky, raining blood over all those racist, misogynist fuckers."

"A man bites into a dry peach and says "This peach is not good;" the peach replies "It is not my fault that you don't know the proper use for a dry peach.""

"If you know me so well, then tell me which hand I use."

"I can't believe that I would keep, keep you from flying And I would cry a thousand more if that's what it takes to sail you home."

"I think there are pieces of me you've never seen."

"Years go by Will I still be waiting For somebody else to understand Years go by If I'm stripped of my beauty And the orange clouds Raining in head Years go by Will I choke on my tears Till finally there is nothing left One more casualty You know we're too easy Easy Easy"

"So you found a girl who thinks really deep thoughts. What's so amazing about really deep thoughts? Boy, you'd best pray that I bleed real soon -- How's that thought for you?"

"So you can make me cum; that doesn't make you Jesus."

"Look, I'm standing naked before you; Don't you want more than my sex? I can scream as loud as your last one, But I can't claim innocence."

"So if I die today, I'll be the happy phantom, And I'll go chasing the nuns out in the yard, ...And the atrocities of school I can forgive: The happy phantom has no right to bitch."

"God, sometimes you just don't come through. Do you need a woman to look after you?"

"I have been surprised, excited and pleasantly shocked by these comics that are extensions of the songs that I have loved and therefore welcome these amazing stories of pictures and words because they are uncompromisingly inspiring. It shows you thought is a powerful, formidable essence and can have a breathtaking domino effect."

"Dark Energy. It can be found in the observable Universe. Found in ratios of 75% more than any other substance. Dark Energy. It can be found in religious extremists, in cheerleaders. To come to the conclusion that Dark signifies mean and malevolent would define 75% of the Universe as an evil force. Alternatively, to think that some cheerleaders don't have razors in their snatch is to be foolishly unarmed."

"And my Saab is so great I'm gonna marry it."

"And I started to think about this story that was taking over my car at that moment. "Jamaica Inn" walked into my Saab and she said, "You might not like my story because i'm not gonna tell you how it ends yet, and you need to travel it with me."

"I got a Saab Convertible."

"I love my Saab."

"Men have periods, too... they just don´t bleed."

"Yeah, there was a period in the late '80s where I was working with different shaman. Myself and a friend, Beene, would take ayahuasca - but it wouldn't be in the liquid form, it would be a freeze-dried pill - and mushrooms. Some of those trips were eighteen hours long and I'll never forget, once I ended up sitting by the bush trying to ask the flowers why they didn't like me. It's like, Why can't I be your friend? I was crawling out of my skin at that time. In my twenties I was really... I was just losing my mind."

"...the most influential journeys I have had have been with Ayahuasca, the vine from the Amazon, the combination of that and mushrooms. They give me the trots and such! It's very much a medicine woman, medicine man's journey drug, where you go inside. It's not a social thing. It's an internal experience. I experiment with things that are usually an internal experience, because that's just what excites me. And yes, it does sometimes give me visions. But my intention when I am doing it is very different than recreational. I don't do it recreationally. I do it to go do inner work, and I'm very clear before I do it what I'm searching for. That way, there's no abuse suffered and I don't rely on it. It's just one more tool that I use sometimes."

"This is very simple in the world of chicks: some are hoochies, some are not, and some should never try to be. It's no different from the idea of sports. Now, I can go on my little rowing machine for four times a week, twenty-two minutes a time, and I can feel as if I flirt with the sporting world. Similar to the idea that a woman can put on something cuter for her man, for those moments, and flirt with garments that a hoochie woman might be pushing. But never for one moment should you get confused. My little rowing machine and I cannot consider ourselves athletes. Wearing the same garment does not a hoochie woman make. So if you are a true hoochie woman, may garments below the navel always be in your future. If you are not, then please don't throw away your cotton zippy jacket."

"If I saw someone destroy a piano I'd fuckin' kill 'em. Wouldn't think twice. [It's] Just defending your best friend!"

"That is some funky-fresh, pop lockin' shit."

"Music can imply the infinite if enough things depart from the norm far enough. Strange "abnormal" events can lead to the feeling that anything can happen, and you have a music with no boundaries."

""...We met in 1950, through John Cage, when I was sixteen and he in his early twenties. We were all doing work that was clearly different, newly different - from one another, but joined by our delight in each other's work (and by John Cage's organizing the concerts of it and a few musicians, David Tudor centrally, playing it), and by its difference from any other we knew. I still find mysterious his way of putting the music together, or rather of erasing any traces of a sense of its having been put together: it's just there. How does he do it? He's the only composer I know whose work seems made in a way that cannot be accounted for, explained, by any other means than the impossible one of becoming that composer oneself. He talked wonderfully, sharply, outrageously, but that wasn't quite his music. One thinks of the disparity of his large, strong presence and the delicate, hypersoft music, but in fact he too was, among other things, full of tenderness and the music is, among other things, as tough as nails." - Christian Wolff, Composer and Pianist"

"[Regarding indeterminacy]"...I think this interest had to do with his interest in painting. He used to put sheets of graph paper on the wall, and work on them like paintings. Slowly his notation would accumulate, and from time to time he'd stand back to look at the overall design. For him it had less to do with belief in chance: it was more function than anything else. He would talk about different weights of sound - and that was simply the easiest way to express them. Pitches didn't really matter, as there were so many other controls, and he used chance without its interfering with expression. What Cage admired in him and what they had most in common was heroism - trusting in performers, despite the risk that they might destroy the thing completely. Unless the performer committed himself to the pieces, they could be horrible, and it was their very dangerousness which made them so beautiful. Cage's were beautiful in the same way, just because you never knew what would come next." - Christian Wolff, Composer and Pianist"

"If you don't have a friend who's a painter, you're in trouble."

"Sound is all our dreams of music. Noise is music's dreams of us."

"Do we have anything in music for example that really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away?"

"My teacher Stefan Wolpe was a Marxist and he felt my music was too esoteric at the time. And he had his studio on a proletarian street, on Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. . . . He was on the second floor and we were looking out the window, and he said, "What about the man on the street?" At that moment . . . Jackson Pollock was crossing the street."

"For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart."

"To me, I took a militant attitude towards sounds. I wanted sounds to be a metaphor, that they could be as free as a human being might be free. That was my idea about sound. It still is, that they should breathe … not to be used for the vested interest of an idea. I feel that music should have no vested interests, that you shouldn't know how it's made, that you shouldn't know if there's a system, that you shouldn't know anything about it … except that it's some kind of life force that to some degree really changes your life … if you're into it."