Top 22 Jackson Browne Quotes

When I really started liking music was when I could play some of it myself, and after a couple of years of playing folk music, I kinda rediscovered those hits that were on the radio all the time when I was a kid.

I taught myself to play the piano, because I wanted to play it.

I’ve also gotten to play in front of a million people in Central Park when there was a grass roots movement calling for nuclear disarmament – it was about 1982 – they called it Peace Sunday.

I’m sensitive, you know, about some things, and as some of my partners could attest to, incredibly insensitive.

Musician jokes are a kind of joke that usually have to do with how much money someone makes. Musicians are always starving, so they’re really mean to each other about who makes what.

I’d have to say that my favorite thing is writing a song that really says how I feel, what I believe – and it even explains the world to myself better than I knew it.

Music itself is a great source of relaxation. Parts of it anyway. Working in the studio, that’s not relaxing, but playing an instrument that I don’t know how to play is unbelievably relaxing, because I don’t have any pressure on me.

I told my father I wanted to play the banjo, and so he saved the money and got ready to give me a banjo for my next birthday, and between that time and my birthday, I lost interest in the banjo and was playing guitar.

So I had a couple of years of playing trumpet. I really enjoyed it, but it was not the kind of instrument you could whip out at a party. Let’s face it.

Now, guitar was pretty cool. Everybody knew something on the guitar. So I wanted to play guitar, but I told my dad if he wanted me to keep studying something, I’d like to study piano.

That’s maybe the most important thing each generation does, is to break a lot of rules and make up their own way of doing things.

I don’t avoid anything. In my songs I just choose to talk about certain things, and so yeah, there are some aspects of my character and personality that don’t come out.

You can take as much as you can from the generation that has preceded you, but then it’s up to you to make something new.

So what I do, more than play any instrument – I mean, I love to play – but more than that, I write songs. Songs that are about living, about what it’s like to be going through all the things that people go through in life.

Right around the end of the fifties, college students and young people in general, began to realize that this music was almost like a history of our country – this music contained the real history of the people of this country.

I love to read. I love to stretch. In the morning, I get up, and if I’m not in a hurry, I will lie on the floor on a rug, look through some books and magazines, and maybe listen to music and try to do stretching exercises to tune up.

The idea that I wrote something that stood for the way I feel about things, and that it lasts, that’s probably my favorite thing that I’ve done.

The biggest influence? I’ve had several at different times – but the biggest for me was Bob Dylan, who was a guy that came along when I was twelve or thirteen and just changed all the rules about what it meant to write songs.

As far as those kinds of things, I also played at the concert to call for the release of Nelson Mandela when he was a political prisoner in South Africa. We were celebrating his 70th birthday and calling for his release.

I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.

And my dad wanted me to play the trumpet because that’s what he liked. His idol was Louis Armstrong. My dad thought my teeth came together in a way that was perfect for playing the trumpet.

My forays into trying to date girls my own age from the school I went to were all pretty tortured.