What would Keith Richards do_ - Jessica Pallington West [36]
“Songs are a funny thing; sometimes I think they write you."
“People reach creative peaks at different times, and you never know when it’s going to come again."
“A painter’s got a canvas. The writer’s got reams of empty paper. A musician has silence."
“I never know what it is I’m looking for, exactly, but when I hit upon it, I know it."
“I’m just working, chipping away at it, more like a sculptor. ‘No, his nose isn’t that big’—whack … You keep patching it up until it feels natural. Nobody creates these things: You’ve just got to be awake with your finger in the air like an antenna."
“You keep searching for things you haven’t heard … I don’t go, ‘I created this!’ … I feel that you receive songs. I never sit down and say, ‘Right, now I’m going to write a song.’ I just sit around and play either piano or guitar … Buddy Holly … Hoagy Carmichael … But usually after twenty minutes or so the fingers are moving somewhere else and you go, ‘Incoming!’ ”
“You make a mistake or you think you made a mistake, but … research that accident! … I’ll buff ’em up a bit and put ’em into recognizable shape, then transmit them, and that’s basically how I feel about writing songs."
“You think if I knew I would tell anybody? The fact is I don’t know. All I know is that they fly in right through the room, they go through concrete, they go through the air. I think everybody now knows that my attitude to songs is that I’m an antenna. I wait, I sit down and play an instrument. The only bit I do is knock it into shape."
—in response to a question of
where his songs come from
“You are just a medium, you just develop a facility for recognizing and picking up things and you just have to be ready … like being at a seance; they just plop out of the air. Whole songs just come to you, you don’t write it … I didn’t do anything except to happen to have been awake when it arrived."
“Sometimes we write songs in installments—just get the melody and music and we’ll cut the tracks and write the words later. That way the actual tracks have matured just like wine—you just leave it in the cellar for a bit, and it comes out a little better a few years later."
“Look at Jimmy Reed: For twenty-five years he did the same song, and every one of them is different."
“As a musician … what you do is fuck around with silence."
“That’s one of the things about music; it’s a hand-me-down … Whether you sell a million records or never made one, if someone’s heard you and you’ve turned them on to it, you’d done your fuckin’ job."
“Hollywood is the end of the line for so many people. It’s a killer, and if you’re weak you can be sure it’ll get you."
“This is not something you retire from. It’s your life writing songs and playing is like breathing—you don’t stop."
“There’s nothing like the human touch."
“My job was the fairy dust."
“A lot of what Mick and I do is fixing and touching up, writing songs in bits, assembling it on the spot."
“In order to do what I do—turn people on—the band needs to be turned on first."
“I’m an unpure purist."
“I like people that know what direction they want to go in as opposed to what people might like. I can’t stand people trying to second-guess the public."
“What goes into a musician’s ear usually comes out one way or another."
“As soon as you stop retouching, or recording on the grounds that, like, ninety percent of the people ain’t gonna know the difference anyway, you’re really lost."
“You don’t want to analyze it too much, because in the process you can lose it."
“If you want to do good stuff, you’re aware that you can’t play it safe—you’ve got to keep pushing the limits. Of course, that can spill over into your life."
“If I choose one, I’ll be killing all my other babies."
—when asked to name his favorite song
DEATH and BEYOND
“I’ve had a few brushes with old death, he’s kind of a friend of mine, actually, and if you hang around me you’ll have a brush with