Alan Light Quotes

There is something about a woman,' said comedian and activist Dick Gregory. "If you look at all the suffering that black folks went through, not one black man would dare to sing 'Mississippi Goddamn.' Not one black man would say what Billie Holiday did about being lynched [in "Strange Fruit"]-they wasn't lynching women, they was lynching men, but it was women that talked about it, and nobody told them to talk about it. No manager going to tell you to talk about this, it's just something inside them.

You don't need a major label and they sure don't need you.

Needless to say, the song ["Hallelujah"] was now a climax in every show [of the 2009 Leonard Cohen tour], received like holy scripture. It belonged in a category with seeing Bob Dylan sing "Like a Rolling Stone" or watching Bruce Springsteen perform "Born to Run" - it was an event that people simply wanted to witness, to say they had seen. It took on a power that had to do with the song's history first, its feeling second, and its details hardly at all. Every performance carried with it a sense of where this song had been, who had sung it,where and how every listener had first encountered it; it had reached a place where it was something to be experienced, rather than listened to.

It's easy to say that reducing a song to 90 seconds on "American Idol" strips off so many things, and how it's the 21st century and music doesn't mean the same things to people and that it's so disposable.

In country and R&B, there's much more of that division between writers and performers, and that's where you see more of those [crossover] songs, but you don't get a lot of that coming out of the more pop and rock side of things.

A rock band is a mysterious thing. Somehow, every once in a while, a few individuals bump into one another, and they look exactly right together and share a focus and an aspiration and the right balance of musical similarities and differences.