Your Song Changed My Life Quotes

“Music can act as an invisible uniting force that claims the unclaimed and defines the outcasts of a culture.”
― Bob Boilen, Your Song Changed My Life: From Jimmy Page to St. Vincent, Smokey Robinson to Hozier, Thirty-Five Beloved Artists on Their Journey and the Music That Inspired It

“These artists are all part of what he sees as a natural musical progression, the “living language” that Tom Manoff wrote about in Music: A Living Language. It’s the idea that music is continuous—it inspires and influences what follows it, forming a never-ending cycle. Artists like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, who inspired many, were influenced by those who came before them.”
― Bob Boilen, Your Song Changed My Life: From Jimmy Page to St. Vincent, Smokey Robinson to Hozier, Thirty-Five Beloved Artists on Their Journey and the Music That Inspired It

“It’s clear the experience of playing those garage rock songs by The Pretty Things and The Kingsmen served him well. “I think [it’s] really good to learn a lot of other people’s songs as a formative part of your musical education. I think that doesn’t happen quite as much these days . . . a lot of young bands don’t come at it having learned a whole lot of other people’s songs.” Tweedy’s”
― Bob Boilen, Your Song Changed My Life: From Jimmy Page to St. Vincent, Smokey Robinson to Hozier, Thirty-Five Beloved Artists on Their Journey and the Music That Inspired It

“Annie Clark is a remarkably creative guitarist, songwriter, and singer. Her music is built on the backs of the great guitar rock heroes of the past. She then strips it of ego and reinvents the sound. It becomes less about long solos, more about succinct statements and poppy, twisted tales.”
― Bob Boilen, Your Song Changed My Life: From Jimmy Page to St. Vincent, Smokey Robinson to Hozier, Thirty-Five Beloved Artists on Their Journey and the Music That Inspired It

“For David, hearing Brown’s music was like seeing a machine in action. He saw how each gear could serve the greater goal. “And only by putting them all together do you get the thing. So that it only exists when all the parts are there. If you take one part out, there’s a hole . . . it’s like if you go to a guitar player and go, play the guitar from ‘Cold Sweat’ or whatever, it sounds ridiculous. You wouldn’t know what it was. And that was a huge thing, and . . . I definitely applied or tried to apply some of that to some of the Talking Heads stuff, not all of it, but just some of it. . . . [I’d think,] Let me see if we can do a song that way, where the different parts are each doing something very different, and then when you put them together, it kind of clicks into place and makes the thing, but . . . the thing doesn’t exist in any part alone.” You can hear this kind of experimentation in “I Zimbra,” from Fear of Music, and in “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On),” from Remain in Light. As”
― Bob Boilen, Your Song Changed My Life: From Jimmy Page to St. Vincent, Smokey Robinson to Hozier, Thirty-Five Beloved Artists on Their Journey and the Music That Inspired It

“I was probably thinking along the lines of imagine Alice Cooper but done by Randy Newman, which—it’s not that big of a leap,”
― Bob Boilen, Your Song Changed My Life: From Jimmy Page to St. Vincent, Smokey Robinson to Hozier, Thirty-Five Beloved Artists on Their Journey and the Music That Inspired It

“Smokey Robinson’s first tune with The Miracles was an “answer” song called “Got a Job.” He wrote it with Berry Gordy, in response to a doo-wop hit by The Silhouettes called “Get a Job.” Theirs was about an unemployed man and his girlfriend, who won’t stop bugging him to get a job. Smokey’s “Got a Job” was about that same guy, this time employed but bemoaning his menial grocery store work: You’ve been houndin’ me to get a job Well I finally did and my boss is a slob He’s on my back really all day long It seems like everything I do is wrong Well, I fin’lly fin’lly fin’lly fin’lly fin’lly (got a job) It’s not exactly genius writing, and it didn’t last the ages, but soon after his initial attempt Smokey changed the art of songwriting for the better, forever.”
― Bob Boilen, Your Song Changed My Life: From Jimmy Page to St. Vincent, Smokey Robinson to Hozier, Thirty-Five Beloved Artists on Their Journey and the Music That Inspired It

“In the 1950s, radio listenership waned with the rise of television, and stations were desperate to capture a larger audience. One development was “Negro stations” that appealed to the black population; by the late 1950s there were about four hundred of them. Top 40 radio, another growing format, played hit songs, a mix of rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and other popular but mostly “safe” music. At its best, Top 40 brought black music to white listeners. At its worst, it replaced the outrageous Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” with a vanilla counterfeit by Pat Boone, who decimated the frenetic energy to create a sanitized Top 40 version. Needless to say, a lot of black music was never heard by white audiences.”
― Bob Boilen, Your Song Changed My Life: From Jimmy Page to St. Vincent, Smokey Robinson to Hozier, Thirty-Five Beloved Artists on Their Journey and the Music That Inspired It