Henry Rollins Song Quotations

Everyone who knows me knows that I'm a hopeless romantic who listens to love ballads and doo-wop songs all the time.

Ramones music has a Pavlovian effect on me - the song starts, and the world blurs around the sound.

The ecstatic insanity of romantic pursuit can be so enhanced by music that entire romantic conquests, victories and ruinous, crushing defeats can be tied to songs to such a degree that it's almost unbearable to listen to them again, as they bring back the memories so vividly.

Whenever any great song or album gets lost in the ether, someone is deprived of the joy of hearing it, and the great effort of those who created and recorded the work is damaged.

The Ruts were a great punk rock band from England whose songs were as excellent as their time together was short.

Between the Dinosaur Jr. albums and his recent solo albums, 'Several Shades of Why' and 'Heavy Blanket,' J Mascis is emerging as one of the last men from all that '80s indie madness, still writing songs that you want to listen to over and over.

I once asked Ozzy Osbourne, truly one of my favorite people in the world, if he was cool with singing Black Sabbath songs year after year, whether he was performing with Black Sabbath or out on a solo tour. He said it was great.

I don't cuss in songs. It's too easy.

In blues music, there's a lot of borrowing, so it's often difficult to identify the originator of a song.

Sitting in a room, alone, listening to a CD is to be lonely. Sitting in a room alone with an LP crackling away, or sitting next to the turntable listening to a song at a time via 7-inch single is enjoying the sublime state of solitude.

One of the nice things about a favorite pop song is that it's an unconditional truce on judgment and musical snobbery. You like the song because you just do, and there need not be any further criticism.

More than 30 years ago, in Washington, D.C., I secured a copy of a single by a Los Angeles band called The Bags. The two-song 7-inch, released on Dangerhouse, had a girl on the cover who looked right at you with huge eyes. The songs, 'Survive' and 'Babylonian Gorgon,' were great and made many of my mix tapes.

I don't know if music has ever achieved anything past appealing to the people that it appeals to. If a song could stop a war, then Bob Marley and Bob Dylan songs would have stopped one or two.

Bands have always written songs against what they see as wrong. Ronald Reagan really made for a lot of songs.

I like the idea of someone else’s love safely sealed in a song or a book.

I do a lot of stuff for free anyway. Like a lot of people who you see who don't need money. Mick Jagger - he needs money? He just likes to go sing Satisfaction every night. If I wrote that song I probably would do it too.

If a slave were to raise his voice to his master, he risked all manner of punishment. Yet what was possible in many circumstances was to lift one's voice in song. This was a major ingredient in what is now known as blues and gospel. Slaves may have been regarded as subhuman by their cruel captors, but through music, they were proud and dignified.

The music kind of takes care of itself because we've done all that as preproduction in the practice room. So by the time it gets onstage, each song has about one hundred hours of way too much mothering gone into it. So when you see us play live, that is the product of ninety days of practice, over a year of writing, listening to demos on the weekends after practice.

Songs sung under duress are often very powerful.

The "I" is always for someone else. When I say "I," it's so that when that person is singing along with the song, it empowers them.

While I have not ruled out the possibility of doing music, what I don't want to do is go onstage and perform old songs. I do, all the time, but I don't think it is artistically brave.

But can a song stop a war? If Bob Marley and Bob Dylan couldn't do it, it can't be done.