Greg Saunier Quotes

Usually if someone starts making universal claims, I tune right on out.

My projects are just side effects of what I obsess over, what I chat about, what random things pop into my head, what I dream at night.

I guess a lot of bands play around until they come up with something they like.

I love love. Growing up, I always thought it was a state, and I'd wait for it to appear. Now I think it's an activity, a skill, something you strive to create. A constant conversation between emotion and imagination and flesh.

It's a great privilege to be able to play that much. When you play a lot, you can be really detail-oriented.

I'm a rock-and-roll drummer, so my job is to create chaos.

It's amazing to think that there must be this river of ideas constantly rushing inside of a person, and once you've somehow found a path into it, then it's just there, whether you will it to be or not.

It's weird to me to even say, "I wrote this song." I never feel like I wrote it; I feel like I heard it.

I'm always looking to disprove what I think I know for sure. I call that learning.

I'm not unswayed by the opinions of others. I actually really value that, the idea that you can feel things the way somebody else might feel them is a really big part of doing music for me.

I've found that writing and playing music has so little to do with will, and so much to do with just finding what's there waiting for you.

The only way the band could make any money was by going on tour. But going on tour meant we had to get time off from our jobs, and we couldn't get enough time off to make enough money from touring to survive, so the only way to try was to quit our jobs. None of us had a job that was so wonderful that we were just dying to keep it.

There's part of me that feels a privilege not to do music, but to do what everybody should be allowed to do, which is to do what you're driven to do.

I try not to think about the drums themselves. If I do, I'll end up hitting myself in the head with a drumstick, or sustaining some weird injury.

That's one of the things that always grabbed me about rock music: There's a song, and you know how it goes, and you can sort of predict it, but a lot is left up to chance and interaction.

When I'm playing best, I'm just thinking about the music, just interacting with what my bandmates are playing.

I have music in my head; I can't help it. You can put a gun to my head and it's not going to go away. The privilege is that I'm not being prevented from following that.

I play drums, and I'd recommend it to anyone, except maybe your neighbors. It's great exercise - physical, mental, emotional, and social. It takes deep concentration but also activates concentration. If you're doing it right, it's always just a little harder than what you can actually pull off.