Ian Anderson famous quotes

Unnur Birna is a Reykjavik-based violinist and singer. She has performed as a session musician with countless Icelandic and international artists while recording and appearing as a solo artist as well. Unnur has joined me as an unpaid guest on a few Icelandic shows in recent years, so it is a great pleasure to return the favour and appear on one of her songs at last. This new track, Sunshine, came about in Italy, written as an ode to sunlight and happiness after fleeing the dark winter in Iceland
-- Ian Anderson

#Song #Sunshine #Dark

I can never make up my mind if I'm happy being a flute player, or if I wish I were Eric Clapton.
-- Ian Anderson

#Happiness #Being Happy #Player

A lot of pop music is about stealing pocket money from children.
-- Ian Anderson

#Children #Rock N Roll #Pockets

In most cases, my favorite Jethro Tull songs will be determined by how I feel about them as live performance songs, not by the recorded identity.
-- Ian Anderson

#Song #Identity #Determined

It was instilled in me that the money I was given was not to be lost or spent on any other purpose.
-- Ian Anderson

#Purpose #Lost #Given

Not to be mean about it, but some great rock and rollers, like Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry, are pretty one-dimensional.
-- Ian Anderson

#Mean #Rocks #Berries

Our politicians may fail us, but Status Quo always delivers on the promise.
-- Ian Anderson

#Promise #May #Failing

The flute was an alternative to being a small fish in an increasingly bigger pool filled with a number of great guitar players.
-- Ian Anderson

#Player #Numbers #Guitar

Touring is what you make it. I like to organise as much as possible myself.
-- Ian Anderson

#Touring

I don't think people really do listen. We plug into music, and we have short attention spans. We tend to download individual tracks from iTunes rather than a whole album. We buy music DVDs and watch them once, and then they disappear into a drawer, or we loan them to a friend, and we never watch it again.
-- Ian Anderson

#Thinking #Dvds #Track

I feel the audience has a right to know if some of the money they're spending is going to a certain cause, and reassuring them the money is going to where it's supposed to be going.
-- Ian Anderson

#Causes #Reassuring #Spending

I've always been fond of acoustic music.
-- Ian Anderson

#Acoustic Music #Acoustics

I'm very much an observer and a conduit of thoughts and ideas.
-- Ian Anderson

#Ideas

If Jesus Christ came back today, He and I would get into our brown corduroys and go to the nearest jean store and overturn the racks of blue denim.
-- Ian Anderson

#Jesus #Blue #Today

It's only the giving that makes you what you are.
-- Ian Anderson

#Giving

Seek that which within lies waiting to begin the fight of your life that is everyday.
-- Ian Anderson

#Lying #Fighting #Waiting

As a musician, life is not over just because you are getting older, and so I find retirement a very frightening and dark thought.
-- Ian Anderson

#Retirement #Dark #Getting Older

Classical music only really came into my life in 1969. I wish I had heard classical music and church music when I was a teenager or even as a child.
-- Ian Anderson

#Children #Teenager #Wish

I make up my own mind in light of available facts, with my own experience and a sense of personal ethics.
-- Ian Anderson

#Light #Mind #Facts

I was not a great guitarist, so I sold my 1960 Fender Stratocaster in exchange for a Shure Microphone, made in Chicago, and a flute.
-- Ian Anderson

#Chicago #Flutes #Made

I'm not one for Sudoku or crosswords - the thing that fires my little brain is doing tour budgets.
-- Ian Anderson

#Fire #Brain #Littles

Another tea-time, another day older.
-- Ian Anderson

#Tea #Another Day #Tea Time

Come with me to the Winged Isle- Northern father's Western child Where the Dance of Ages is playing still through far marches of Acres Wild.
-- Ian Anderson

#Children #Father #Age

Walk the lines of nature's palm crossed with silver and with gold.
-- Ian Anderson

#Nature #Gold #Lines

I am not afraid to appear in Israel, although when I come to a place like Israel, I know it's not a picnic by the Thames. I am aware of the tension and it saddens me.
-- Ian Anderson

#Israel #Picnics #Thames

Bring me a wheel of oaken wood A rein of polished leather A Heavy Horse and a tumbling sky Brewing heavy weather.
-- Ian Anderson

#Horse #Sky #Weather

Just once I would like to persuade the audience not to wear any article of blue denim. If only they could see themselves in a pair of brown corduroys like mine instead of this awful, boring blue denim.
-- Ian Anderson

#Blue #Denim #Awful

Question all as to their ways and learn the secrets that they hold
-- Ian Anderson

#Secret #Way

The original Jethro Tull was a 19th century English agriculturist who invented a seed drill you see... the first automatic process where by small holes were made in Mother Earth and even smaller seeds were deposited one at a time and neetly covered over as a cat does after having being naughty.
-- Ian Anderson

#Mother #Cat #Naughty

Oh father high in heaven - smile down upon your sonWho's busy with his money games - his women and his gun.
-- Ian Anderson

#Father #Gun #Games

Martin, Dave, and I get together and rough out a few songs and put them on cassettes for some reference...With the actual music, I'm not interested in objectivity, quite the opposite. I want a solely and totally subjective experience...A lot of pop music is about stealing pocket money from children.
-- Ian Anderson

#Song #Children #Objectivity

But the tune ends too soon for us all
-- Ian Anderson

#Life #Tunes #Ends

Cafe society is as old as the hills. Starbucks and its imitators are the coffee face of the new man in a hurry.
-- Ian Anderson

#Coffee #Men #Cafes

I suppose when I started playing guitar, it was the means to an end. I never thought of myself as a fully fledged guitar instrumentalist. And my early excursions on the electric guitar were curtailed when Eric Clapton came on the scene, and I decided I was never going to be in the same arena as a Clapton or a Peter Green.
-- Ian Anderson

#Mean #Guitar #Green

I think I've owned all the models of iPods so far. And these days between my iPod, iPhone and my personal laptop computer, I'm someone who is very, very grateful for all the ways to listen to music and completely switch off from people around me and listen to the music in detail, which is very hard to do if you're in a room with other people.
-- Ian Anderson

#Grateful #Thinking #Ipods

I think it's really the job of the composer, the artist, the painter, the writer to present people with options. I'm just really reflecting the thoughts and actions around me.
-- Ian Anderson

#Jobs #Thinking #Artist

I was quite keen on silviculture, the growing of trees, and that was something I gave a lot of thought to. Maybe I could've gone in that direction. But it just so happened that while I was trying to make up my mind, I enrolled in art school, and there I began to develop my interest in music, parallel with my interest in the visual arts.
-- Ian Anderson

#Art #School #Tree

In writing lyrics - well, for me, anyway - it's about getting into character, you know? 'Who is writing this?' In the case of the original 'Thick As A Brick,' supposedly a precocious, very young child who's fantasizing about his future and the context of all the confusing elements to which school boys are subjected at that time.
-- Ian Anderson

#Children #Character #Writing

It's nice to be recognized, but it's not great to have it too conspicuously recognized, if you see what I mean. Gold records on the wall, or titles after your name, it's just not something... I don't feel that great about it.
-- Ian Anderson

#Wall #Nice #Mean

We do hear perhaps too many accolades generally aimed at people like Steve Jobs. We have to remember that there are other classic things in life that we undervalue and take them for granted. If you think of the classic lines of the modern jet aircraft, it's really been there since early World War II.
-- Ian Anderson

#Jobs #War #Thinking

When I was a teenager, I really didn't like loud rock music. I listened to jazz and blues and folk music. I've always preferred acoustic music. And it was only, I suppose, by the time Jethro Tull was getting underway that we did let the music begin to have a harder edge, in particular with the electric guitar being alongside the flute.
-- Ian Anderson

#Teenager #Rocks #Guitar

When I was a young boy, I preferred cats to dogs. From the age of seven or eight onwards I just felt more comfortable with cats. And I felt more comfortable with girls, I didn't really like hanging out with guys. When I was about ten or eleven, I was friendlier with the girls in my school than with the guys.
-- Ian Anderson

#Girl #Dog #Cat

I'm really terrible with small children; they're small, noisy, irritating, damp and soggy.
-- Ian Anderson

#Children #Terrible #Irritating