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All Leo Kottke 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.
Leo Kottke
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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.
Leo Kottke
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You can't really tell what the audience wants but you can tell what will keep everybodies attention in the same place.
Leo Kottke
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I have always thought of myself as a performer first and way down the line as a recording artist.
Leo Kottke
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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.
Leo Kottke
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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.
Leo Kottke
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It was almost two years after I left Capital that I put out the first one on Chrysalis and that was really instructive because it was no better in particular than any other record I'd done.
Leo Kottke
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I had been playing single note instruments and I wanted to hear a guitar played as a piano.
Leo Kottke
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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.
Leo Kottke
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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.
Leo Kottke
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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.
Leo Kottke
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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.
Leo Kottke
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It was a kind of paralysis you would get from tendonitis and I would last about five to ten minutes into the set and it would set in and I really couldn't play.
Leo Kottke
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I was taking a nose dive somewhere between eleven and twelve because my sister had died and I was practicing something that siblings do which is follow in their footsteps and die as well.
Leo Kottke
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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!
Leo Kottke
48% of people like this quote
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