Leo Kottke's Quotes

The bulk of my set is instrumental and you have to give yourself and the audience some relief because a performance is not about great guitar playing it's really about entertainment.

The principle element in a performance is risk, and if you're losing interest then by scaring yourself to death the audience will feel it and boy it'll wake them up.

We spent a lot of time on that record with the sound and recorded it on the Paramount sound stage which is this huge room where the sound is reflected but the reflection is so late and comes from so far away that it doesn't blur the music but gives you a room nonetheless.

When a record company looks at me I'm very hard to market, I don't really fit anywhere, It's hard to get me on the air, and I'm hard to demography, but! because of that I'm not subject to trends like you pointed out.

When the audience is awful you can still have a great night and people will walk out thinking they had a great time even though there was loads of loudmouths and the sound was terrible.

Yeah I do and I don't mind, in fact that is one of the real encouraging things about this whole career of mine is that there are tunes I wrote almost thirty years ago that I will still play in front of an audience and I still like the old tunes.

Yes and for two reasons: one, I couldn't find anything to imitate at the time, and secondly because what I heard on the radio didn't bear any resemblance to what I wanted to hear on the guitar.

I don't spend a lot of time thinking of what they'll do musically, I try to imagine being locked into a windowless room with this person for twelve hours at a time. If you can look at that and think it might be fun then maybe you've got the right musician.

I will literally open my mouth not knowing what is coming out.

I'm not subject to their rise and fall because I'm not accepted by them, so I have my own little curve going on. A lot of it is because of how much I play, I think I connect like when all you had was Vaudeville, I think I have an audience by performing a lot!

There are nights when you can feel stale because you've fallen into a pattern by touring too much, but it's easy to get out of it by deliberately getting in trouble and playing yourself into a corner to then see if you can get out of it.

I am evidence that you don't have to sell a lot of records or succeed in the usual way to have a big audience and a job.

I had been playing single note instruments and I wanted to hear a guitar played as a piano.

I have always thought of myself as a performer first and way down the line as a recording artist.

I was two and a half and my folks would put it on the record player and I would run around the house screaming, but I haven't been that hip since.

It depends on the time of the year and who I've been talking to, I try to put people in the studio I like.

The first music I was exposed to was Stravinsky and I loved it but I don't remember it.

We had a day off here yesterday and I just sat in my room and played.

Yeah, the first thing that comes to mind is not to try too hard.

You can't really tell what the audience wants but you can tell what will keep everybodies attention in the same place.

I do have a library of events I can talk about and I always expect to find a different point of view on it so even if I talk about the same event in the same town it's fresh.

I seem to find different material every four to six months and I frequently forget it which is a shame because it would be nice to have a bigger library.

I think if you are writing an instrumental you are dealing with more of an aesthetic in a sense but a lyric is more of a putting yourself on the line and a much more expensive exercise.