Multi Instrumentalists

"Some folks thought Rahsaan Roland Kirk's playing multiple horns at once was a gimmick. Granted, the guy looked like a madman with all sorts of woodwinds strapped around him, with maybe a tenor sax or manzello and stritch (both obscure saxophones) in his mouth at the same time, but Kirk was a hell of an improviser, often harmonizing with himself. There's a live recording of Kirk playing "Sentimental Journey" on one horn and Dvorak's "New World Symphony" on the other, and Kirk said it's splitting the mind into two parts. "It's like making one part of your mind say, 'Ob-la-di' and make the other part of your mind say 'What does it mean'?" Not only was Kirk a damn fine saxophonist but his flute playing, while scatting, heavily influenced Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull."

"The first woman to be featured on the cover of Flatpicking Guitar Magazine, Frazier’s talent as a guitarist is much respected in bluegrass circles."

"Much of the session work [Atkins] recorded and/or produced in Nashville with artists like Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison and the Everly Brothers laid the foundation for early rock and roll."

"Chet Atkins was the man. Beloved of the generation of guitarists that went on to be the generation of the ‘60s, Chet was the titan of country music whose flatpickin’, acoustic-ripping playing would give anyone pause to stop, listen and admire. Responsible for creating the Nashville sound and bringing country into pop, as a guitarist his influence was felt far and wide. Solid as a rock, technically perfect, and an all-time great without compare."

"Though comfortable playing many styles, Atkins was most often associated with country music and the acoustic guitar. [...] A guitar legend, Atkins was elected to the Country Music Hal of Fame in 1973. His musical contributions inspired artists ranging from Eric Johnson to the late Lenny Breau."

"If we’d like to be honest about gender in the music world, we need to address all parties. Women need to invest in themselves, hustle for gigs, network, and do the work of forming bands and cultivating their own talents if they would like to be taken seriously. The industry pretty much always rewards women who do these things. I’m not interested in any special handout just for being a woman. But on the other hand, if a woman is doing these things, yet she’s told ‘We already have enough women on the bill, so we’ll call you next year’—now that’s an issue. No one says to a male artist, ‘We already have enough men on the bill!’"

"First arriving in Nashville as part of an early '50s incarnation of the Carter Family, Atkins rose to the very apex of the Nashville music scene, helping to architect the "Nashville Sound" as a producer and executive, while recording a large discography of his own guitar work."

"The original acoustic guitar hero, Bert Jansch was a player’s player, and you need only look at the list of people that count him as an influence to see that. Everybody from Jimmy Page and Neil Young to Pete Doherty and beyond cite Jansch’s distinctive and wide-ranging style as an essential ingredient in their playing. One of the true pathfinders of the ‘60s folk music, Jansch’s complex fingerpicking and dark, brooding songwriting established his reputation, and whether solo or with Pentangle he proved his boundless ability with an acoustic time and time again."

"Georg Philipp Telemann was probably the most prolific composer in musical history. He wrote almost as much as Bach and Handel put together (and each of them wrote a perplexing amount) including 600 French overtures or orchestral suites, 200 concertos, 40 operas and more than 1000 pieces of church music."

"Basically, if you’re a guitar player, there’s riffs that are going to come out. It just happens. It’s part of it. So we’re not lacking in inspiration. George (Kollias) is always playing drums, so he’s always got drum ideas. You know, (guitarists) Brian (Kingsland) and Zach (Jeter) are always playing. So there are always new guitar ideas. It’s not necessarily an endless well, and not every riff that we come up with manages to make its way into a song. That is where it comes from; we love to play music, so we’re always riffing. But, as soon as you try to dictate to the muse, it goes away. You can’t force yourself to be creative. You can be disciplined and work on your craft every day. That’s a little bit different. Not always is gold just gonna fall out of the sky, like when you hear a Nile record. You know that’s not just because we sat down in 10 minutes and said, “Okay, we’re done writing the record”. No, those songs took years to put together. A lot of blood, sweat, and tears went into taking the inspiration that we had and crafting it into something."

"Sometimes the riffs, the ideas that are simpler, make a more direct connection and you can allow it to have that weight. Heaviness, doom, it’s a very elusive quality. If you get too tricky with it you lose that feeling of doom very quickly. It’s fleeting. It will run away, like a deer!"

"It became obvious to us early on that if you put in too many exotic elements, at some point it’s no longer really a metal record. Different Nile albums have had varying levels of extraneous elements to them. [...] It’s always a variable based on what each songs need. It’s the randomness of the universe."

"I didn’t get really exposed to metal until I was a teenager, but world history I loved from a very early age. I was in fourth grade and had to do a book report on Alexander The Great, and that just fired my brain up. My dad was always watching the epic flicks of the day like Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments, Land Of The Pharaohs, so it was a worm in my brain from an early age."

"The 80s were a lot of fun. It was a time where everybody had disposable income so everybody was always going out. There were half a dozen places to play in my home town. You could have quite the life playing four nights a week, even as a cover band, but after a while we wanted to write our own songs. You have to start asking yourself, ‘What is it I wanna do? What do we wanna sound like?’ It was a chance meeting with [ex-Morbid Angel frontman] David Vincent while we were playing Charlotte, North Carolina, where he introduced me to this whole universe of underground death metal that I was completely unaware of. That was the poison apple that I bit and it soon infected my entire band. [...] The vibe in the late 90s was that death metal was dead. We didn’t care though, because we were going to do whatever we wanted to do, the world be damned. We were from Greenville, South Carolina, which is a nowhere town. Already we had wrestled with the idea that probably no one was going to give a fuck, so let’s just do what we like and own it. We didn’t care about the ebb and flow of whatever is currently popular. [...] That mindset has helped us over the years, remembering who we are and why we’re doing what we’re doing. It’s humbling in a way that we are just some guys from South Carolina who are willing to work hard. We were happy that the timing of the universe then worked in our favour. You can’t complain - you just have to thank the metal gods."

"People radically underestimate what it takes to try and take all that sonic abuse and turn it into something that you can listen to. It eats the mix (fast double kicks), and then you add some down-tuned guitars and some low screaming, growling vocals. How on earth do you hear anything?"

"I think we’re aliens. I think we’re not necessarily native to this planet. I think we came here from somewhere else, destroyed ourselves a couple of times, and what’s left after all that period of chaos, that’s what we have left, and that’s why no one knows where the fuck we came from. The early part of human history and civilisation is riddled with unknowns. Where did we come from? Where did these ideas come from? How do the Egyptians have such an advanced civilisation? Well, I think it came from before and just no one remembers. (The) last Ice Age, when the sea levels rose 400 meters. There’s a whole lot of stuff sitting out there, covered by water that we have no idea where the fuck it is. What was there? Just imagine if you took our sea level right now and raised it by 400 meters, how much of our current civilisation would then be underwater? So what happened at the end of the last stage? How do we know what was before the end of the last ice age? We only have a few things you know left. So you know, and how much shit survives 10,000 years of natural decay? Not much. Why do we still even know about the Egyptians? Well, they managed to build some shit that lasted 1000s of years, right? Otherwise, would we know anything about them? No, we wouldn’t; or it just be speculation, hearsay, and rumour."

"I was always a metal head. [...] My influences back then were Clive Burr with Iron Maiden and Tommy Aldridge, who did amazing things with Ozzy Osbourne. And then when music started getting a little more extreme, I enjoyed Dan Beehler of Exciter, Gene Hoglan of Dark Angel, and, of course, Dave Lombardo of Slayer."

"If anything, moving your limbs as a drummer keeps them lubricated. Look at Buddy Rich: He was whaling the hell out of his drums until he was an old man. Although it wasn’t metal music, he was doing blasts on the snare–he was a blastmaster!"

"The whole point of Satanic music is to blaspheme against the Church. [...] I don't believe in or worship a devil. Life is short enough without having to waste it doing this whole organized praying, hoping, wishing-type thing on some superior being."

"Stuff [in the world] is just amazing. Whether somebody created it, I just don't know, maybe somebody did. Maybe it just worked out that way. Even if there is a God he don't give a shit. People think he's keeping track of everyone's individual lives but that's ridiculous. People have ideas implanted into their f---ing brains so early that, of course, they say, 'Oh, it's a lake of fire, it's eternal pain, it's being up to your neck in piss.' I personally think that when you're dead you're just moss in the ground. It's a sad reality but you're just a corpse and you're going to turn to dust."

"I use drum triggers on the kicks, but not on the other drums–otherwise you just sound unnatural, like a machine. [...] For the blast beats, timing is all important. Practice slowly and build up to full speed so you can insert fills and rolls. Keep your lower extremities loose, too. Kick back, breathe properly, and let the sticks do the work."

"We were just kind of writing the record, and we were going over the songs. Me and Glen, we were, like, 'We wanna redo the songs.' It's like we had completed them — about nine or twelve, whatever how many songs. They were all right, but we weren't really psyched about them. So we decided to rewrite them. And Jack didn't really like it. And he kind of left one day and just never came back. So that was that. He's not on [the new album]. I haven't talked to the guy in almost a year."

"I heard that you don't do favors for the mob but do you treat the devil the same?"

"Your connections and the relationships you maintain basically guide you through your career and they grow into the music that you hear."

"We didn’t have a lot of money, but my parents asked me if I wanted to play the violin. My older brother plays country music and I was supposed to go into that... A path to classical music usually starts with privilege. There needs to be a certain level of income so you can afford an instrument and private lessons. [Where he grew up] classical music education was exclusively in the cities. Sometimes, you’d have to drive three hours to find a high school orchestra."

"I must say that I tended to rise to the occasion more when there was a programmatic theme, and you can start to visualize things easier that was as opposed to going from one tune to another, without ever getting anywhere. If you are thinking about writing a suite then it's more of an inspirational challenge I think. I must be honest and say that I did those four Moon Suite pieces very quickly. It wasn't unusual for everything to be last minute and I was constantly finishing off the last one for the copyists to be able to bring it to the studio half an hour before the end of the session."

"I would be spooning my 6'8" boyfriend. I'm the big spoon, obviously. He'll love that I said that."

"I only arrived in the world in 1988, by which point you were already seeing many of the great things happen and by the time I started going clubbing it was all about jungle It was great fun, but a hostile environment. It wasn’t a place for a gangly, 6-foot-5-inch, mousy-haired, scarf-wearing twat like myself. More a place go and do shed loads of cocaine and try and start a fight. But I loved the sound system. The culture of taking sound systems around really interested me, and when dubstep broke, that was it."

"To be able to interpret a piece, I have to fall in love with it. First and foremost, it must fill me with emotion so that I may do the same for those listening to it, even when I’m not composing the music or the lyrics, if I accept to sing a piece, it is because it reaches my heart and at that point it becomes a part of me, it’s my own."

"I have always found poetry and beauty in the church attributing central stage to a female presence who works on our behalf. I am a devotee of the Virgin to whom I always dedicate part of my prayers."

"When you get into the areas of eroticism, politics, and belligerency, you have to be careful. Some of it will get out. Both Charlie and I have slanted minds. If “Relax” or “Sugar Walls" can be hits, there is a place for that kind of stuff, too. It's fun and interesting to write about that. Or with politics: Third World people own the bomb. That's probably where the nuclear war will start. They have nothing to lose. You can write about that. It'll be just another record from a romantic cynic."

"They said the scene was going to be patriotic, with the flag and Apollo fighting the Russian, and it had to be pro-American. We said we didn’t really want to go flag waving. We just wanted to have a good time, write a funky number and sing about America."

"Working with Dan was like going to an institute of higher learning in pursuit of a PhD in the art of collaboration. Before this, I had been the lead singer in bands and expected to write the lyrics, and it had been expected for those lyrics to express my experience and worldview. That had been my job, and, for the most part, no collaboration had been necessary...which opinion was better or worse did not enter into the dynamic, because we both understood that our sensibilities were not the same, and that, left alone, either of our opinions might or might not have worked, but the point of the collaboration was to create a work that was Hartman and Midnight, not Hartman alone or Midnight alone..."

"I have a bit of anger about some things going on in the world that I know I want to sing about. I’ve never done that on a solo album before; they’ve been mostly about romance and relationships…The concept is Dan Hartman, so whatever’s happening to me when I begin to put out the feelings will be what the album is about. Whether I’m in love, out of love, or the next plane blows up…whatever, I just want to stay creative and hopefully keep people thinking and feeling…At least feel something."

"I don’t necessarily do music for the pure art sake of my own self-expression, which is why a lot of people make music—to express themselves. I really feel that the work I do, be it writing, singing or producing, I do in order to help communicate feelings to other people, hoping they might feel the same things, that they somehow relate to it or get an experience from it that they can share with themselves."

"I realize all you need to do is do it. I think we all restrict ourselves in our lives from doing things. We have choices and alternatives."

"I started producing before I even joined the Legends—around 1962... I produced some local R&B, rock and gospel acts at Baldwin Sound in Mechanicsburg [Pennsylvania]. People would hear what I'd done on someone else's record and call me up and ask if I'd produce them, too. I even wrote and recorded an advertising jingle for Sutliff Chevrolet out on Paxton Street when I was 16. So it's always been something that I could fall back on throughout my career--to keep my mind going, to keep me musically inspired, and to keep me moving without having to make statements of my own…"

"Somebody asked him to write a song for Aretha. You would get a demo that sounded like, you know, Aretha! If you asked him to write a song for Barry White, you’d get a demo that sounded like Barry White. He was brilliant at that."

"...People get confused because they want the boxes your talent comes in to be always the same shape and the same colour. If you don't do that then people lose track of who you are. They say 'Oh, he doesn't know himself'. But I know who I am. The energy is the same, the expression is the same and the work diligence is the same. Always. It's just that sometimes it all comes in different boxes and different colours. It may be weird to some people but it surely doesn't bother me."

"It seemed to be a natural period when I wanted to stop doing pop records; it came with a falling-out between my record company and me...There was a hole in my career. Instead of a valley, it became a peak to me. I decided I was going to do something that I hadn’t really had time to do."

"Sure. It does lean more towards the industry standard rather than towards my roots. But I meant it to be that way for a reason. To begin with this is my first album in about three years and my first for a new label. So I wanted the album to have the same basic listenability throughout and I wanted the record company to feel that they could hear four or five potential singles on it. Tracks that would work on the radio. Because that was what I was aiming for, I had to make sure that each song would capture an exact feeling which would get across to the most number of people. I always like to make records like that. I hate records where all the musicians or the artiste are really saying is 'Dig Me!' You can lose a lot of your potential audience by making self-indulgent statements. Unless, of course, you're so neat and groovy that people say 'Wow Man! Come All Over Me!'. Now I think I am pretty neat and groovy, but I prefer to make the sort of records which will make people think about themselves, not about me. Pop music shouldn't really express the innermost thoughts of the artiste as much as giving the listeners a feeling of exuberance or pain or power or whatever. To give them a sense of their own selves. Once you start making music with that sort of end in mind, you realise that you have to make it less jagged and more compartmentalised. And so the reason I Can Dream About You sounds maybe as Industry Standard as it does is because it was designed to get through to as many different sorts of people as possible. And that isn't necessarily a negative factor."

"I started reading books about the subconscious mind and intuitiveness, and what makes people tick when they hear songs that excite them, make them feel romantic or melancholy. I was in and out of bookstores and libraries. I read a lot of texts, including on primitive man and the workings of the way we emotionally react to things. It wasn’t scholarly or scientific. I read and skimmed and when I thought something was nonsense, I just moved on…"

"In my mind, recognition has never been something to be obtained…I’m happy that more people appreciate what I’m doing, and are hearing my music. When I write, I communicate my own message, my own feelings and passion. I’m glad that they are being accepted."

"As an artist, I don’t like being able to be seen…If you’re having difficulty getting a part, it adds to the tension when the assistant engineer, engineer, producer and producer’s wife are hanging out. With the School-house, my engineer’s in the control room, and I could be doing vocals while stretching my T-shirt over my head and it wouldn’t matter. Everyone who’s worked here has gotten used to this nonvisual communication and actually found it to be advantageous. That’s what home studios are about — that funky thing."

"Dan always liked to have a lyric before he wrote a melody and created a track. He reasoned that he needed to know the essence of the song in order to inspire his creative process. As a result, we would discuss an idea and I would then write lyrics. Often, I would throw out some lines or titles before proceeding to ensure that Dan agreed on the direction. If he concurred then I would go on to complete a lyric. Dan was very tough and uncensored in his assessments but our dynamics allowed for this. Being satisfied with the final work was all that mattered. However, because of his unvarnished critiques, I developed a system wherein I would write many alternative lyrics so that Dan could have choices."

"The bass suit was actually one of the first cordless guitars in existence, and I invented it. It was built right into this silver bodysuit so it looked as though the bass was coming out of my body, and the volume and tone knobs were on the sleeve...When it worked it was great, but the tunings were a little strange, plus I can’t tell you how many times I got shocked. It wound up being just one more thing that we had to worry about on tour: ‘Well, I wonder if this will work tonight.’ After a while I couldn’t stand wearing it anymore so I gave it up."

"Creativity is an interesting thing…You can sit back, have a glass of wine, watch some television…and get a terrific idea of what you want to do…The great thing about being at home is that as soon as you get an idea you can put a mike at the piano and record it. That way you don’t lose the vibes, and you don’t have to worry about finishing before the studio’s next booking arrives…”"

"I think James Brown has made a lot of good records (in recent years)…But it was that purist James Brown thing that he was doing in the beginning and people won’t let him do that anymore because time marches on…That stuff is classic to me, but other people get bored with it. The challenge is to present something that is him, yet sounds fresh to listeners. That’s usually hard for (a veteran artist) to do. It helps to have someone step in from outside…I am proud of what we did on the album. I think it does present a contemporary James Brown. It’s not candy-coated. It has a lot of statement and a lot of heart."

"The reality of Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes is here, only if he were around now, he’d say “Now it’s five.” We’re going so fast, we don’t know what’s going on inside anymore. We’re becoming external, not feeling anything."

"In a lot of ways this music is soothing. I think there’s a place for music that is peaceful and soulful unto the spirit. After plane bombings, AIDS and everything that has come upon us in this decade, I think we can use a little solace and reflection."