Bowie...

Critchley notes how often the word ‘nothing’ appears in Bowie’s lyrics;. This tends not to involve the usual meaning (complete negation) but to lean more towards a “restless nothing shaped by… our fearful sickness unto death” or something like the Buddhist notion of a selfless meditative state on the path to enlightenment, which within Bowie became “mobile and massively creative.”

Listen to the @rocknrolltweets song list...

You can find the @rocknrolltweets song list on Twitter at twitter.

I've never been too impressed.---Dylan via @Rocknrolltweets

Well, I've been to the mountain,
And I've been in the wind,
I've been in and out of happiness,
I have dined with kings,
I've been offered wings
And I've never been too impressed.

Little Wing-- Jimi Hendricks

"Little Wing is like one of these beautiful girls that come around sometimes ... you play your gig; it's the same thing as the olden days, and these beautiful girls come around.. you do actually fall in love with them because that's the only love you can have. It's not always the physical thing of "Oh, there's one over there ...", it's not one of those scenes. They actually tell you something. They release different things inside themselves ... "Little Wing" was a very sweet girl that came around that gave me her whole life and more if I wanted it ... " - Jimi Hendrix

Like cloak and dagger..

Like cloak and dagger
I put the word out on the waterfront
We were living hard
Living fast
Outrunning ghosts
From the past--Robbie Robertson

Etta James and Jimi Hendrix --Nashville

Even as hillbilly music became central to Nashville’s identity and music commerce, a string of clubs on Jefferson Street played host to electrifying rhythm and blues. It’s where Jimi Hendrix cut his teeth and where Etta James Rocked The House on her famous 1964 live recording from the New Era Club. Meanwhile white and black met in Printer’s Alley, where Music Row studio musicians gathered at day’s end to play jazz and rock and roll.

Valhalla, I am coming!

We come from the land of the ice and snow,
From the midnight sun where the hot springs blow.
The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands,
To fight the horde, singing and crying: Valhalla, I am coming! --Led Zeppelin

The Changing of The Guards

Gentlemen, he said I don't need your organization, I've shined your shoes
I've moved your mountains and marked your cards
But Eden is burning either brace yourself for elimination
Or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards.--Dylan

Lou Reed...

In the late '70s I started to search for the perfect sound - whatever that might be, before that I was mainly interested in drugs, insanity and the rock'n'roll lifestyle.
Lou Reed

Ry Cooder on Bill Clinton

'Yeah, Clinton did good,' he says. 'But he also ushered in the era of Nafta, the North American Free Trade Area, which made Juarez, Mexico, the murder capital of the world, with women raped for their pay cheques. That was another nail in the coffin of workers' lives

Do you Fear Death?--Jim Morrison

People fear death even more than pain. It's strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah, I guess it is a friend.
Jim Morrison

Expose Yourself to Your Deepest Fear--Jim Morrison

Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free. --
Jim Morrison

Avoiding A Life of Sorrow and Despair:

Kris Kristofferson has stated that he was greatly influenced by the poet William Blake while at Oxford, who had proclaimed that if one has a God-given creative talent then one should use it, or else reap sorrow and despair.

Mose Allison and Gatemouth Brown

I'm a big fan of Mose Allison. He and Gatemouth Brown were two of my biggest influences. --J.J. Cale

J.J. Cale

Singer/songwriter J.J. Cale's songs have been covered by artists ranging from Johnny Cash to Captain Beefheart. But his trademark sinuous, bluesy guitar lines and mumbly, near-whispered vocals have been popularized by Dire Straits and Eric Clapton; the latter's versions of "After Midnight" and "Cocaine" have become radio hits.

What to do if you are depressed? -- Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin

On the power of music, told to The Scotsman in 2010: “If I ever really felt depressed, I would just start putting on all my old records that I played as a kid, because the whole thing that really lifted me then still lifted me during those other times. It was good medicine for me, and it still does that for me when I put something on. Isn’t it wonderful that we’ve got all that good medicine? I think it’s got to be all part of our DNA, this mass communication through music. That’s what it is. It’s got to be, hasn’t it? Music is the one thing that has been consistently there for me. It hasn’t let me down.”

Live as me.

I'd love to live in Ireland but I'd like to live as me, not what someone thinks I am. People don't understand - I lived there before I was famous.
Van Morrison

Blonde on Blonde

On its release, Blonde on Blonde was not short of critics who argued the album was a major work. To accompany the songbook of Blonde on Blonde, Paul Nelson wrote an introduction stating, "The very title suggests the singularity and the duality we expect from Dylan. For Dylan’s music of illusion and delusion—with the tramp as explorer and the clown as happy victim, where the greatest crimes are lifelessness and the inability to see oneself as a circus performer in the show of life—has always carried within it its own inherent tensions...Dylan in the end truly UNDERSTANDS situations, and once one truly understands anything, there can no longer be anger, no longer be moralizing, but only humor and compassion, only pity."


For Mike Marqusee, Dylan had succeeded in combining traditional blues material with modernist literary techniques: "[Dylan] took inherited idioms and boosted them into a modernist stratosphere. 'Pledging My Time' and 'Obviously 5 Believers' adhered to blues patterns that were venerable when Dylan first encountered them in the mid-fifties (both begin with the ritual Delta invocation of "early in the mornin"). Yet like 'Visions of Johanna' or 'Memphis Blues Again', these songs are beyond category. They are allusive, repetitive, jaggedly abstract compositions that defy reduction."

Corroncho project

Between 2003 and 2008 Phil Manzanera collaborated with Colombian artist/sculptor Lucho Brieva on the Corroncho project. The project sprang from a Spanish version of the track Complicada, written by Brieva's wife Chrissie Hynde. The resulting album comprises a set of songs about two corroncho characters (corroncho being the pejorative name given by people from Bogota to fellow Colombians from the Caribbean Coast, particularly Barranquilla. The album includes the musical styles of salsa, cumbia, pop music, ballads and chillout and has guest appearances from Robert Wyatt, Paul Thompson, Enrique Bunbury, Chrissie Hynde, Annie Lennox, Quimi Portet, Gilad Atzmon, and one of Cuba’s top pianists Aldo Lopez Gavilan.

Bowie on Religion

"I'm in awe of the universe, but I don't necessarily believe there's an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance. The incense is powerful and provocative, whether Buddhist or Catholic."[