Which are your favorite Jesse Colin quotes?
Jesse Colin is an American singer and songwriter. He is best recognized for being the founding member and lead singer of the group band ‘The Youngbloods’.
Together with his bandmates, Colin successfully released 5 albums. Their band’s single ‘Get Together’ reached number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart.
After the dissolution of the band, Colin went on to embark his solo career and released several hits albums with world-renowned music labels, earning him massive success in the music industry. Throughout his career as a singer, he has amassed many prestigious achievements in the music industry.
His solo albums ‘Light Shine’ reached number 37 in both U.S and Canada, and he also notably received a Grammy Awards nomination for his song ‘Sunlight’.
Here’s a collection of the best Jesse Colin quotes:
50 Legendary Jesse Colin Quotes
1. “I saw some people raising their fists while singing and I thought, ‘Wow, what’s going on?’ After the show, I realised that it was the one-year anniversary of Charlottesville and those people were saying no to white nationalism and saying yes to peace and love. It blew me away.” – Jesse Colin
2. “I had seen Buzzy play vibes with Tim Hardin, but I didn’t know he was a singer. I ran backstage and said, ‘Please, I need the lyrics. I’m in love with this song, I’m going to sing it,’ and I knew it would change my life and I knew it would be central to my career and my development as a human being. It was that powerful.” – Jesse Colin
3. “Connie and I wrote a couple of the songs together, including Cast A Stone which opens the album. When we wrote that it came so quickly I think I knew that I was getting better because there weren’t many songs in the years before that.” – Jesse Colin
4. “Then whenever I wrote a song over the next three or four years, I would go in and tell Django, ‘It’s time to work,’ and he would come and curl up at my feet and stay there. So yes, maybe there were three or four songs over that period, but that was it.” – Jesse Colin
5. “We recorded most of this live, not the background singers but everyone else. I had a little room so I could play acoustic guitar, Tristan was out playing bass with the drummer. The keyboard player was direct and the same thing with the guitarist. We picked Sound Emporium Studios because they had one room where I could see everyone.” – Jesse Colin
6. “When we went in to record we didn’t change a lot of the structures, we were pretty settled and we wanted to be.” – Jesse Colin
7. “They call those the formative years. Alan Freed, a disc jockey in New York came on the radio when I was 10. There was a lot of doo-wop back then and all of a sudden we got Fats Domino, Little Richard, and eventually Elvis.” – Jesse Colin
8. “I think the theme of what I’m writing about in some ways dictates the musical style. They’re all styles that are natural to me, in my life I’ve used them all so they’re all part of me. They come out in one direction or another and I seldom change that.” – Jesse Colin
9. “I really have no control over that and I don’t want to. With this record, because time became short and I was three or four songs down, I had to get up every day open up my hands to the heavens, and say, ‘I’ll take some inspiration now please,’. And it kind of worked.” – Jesse Colin
10th 0f 50 Jesse Colin Quotes
10. “Well, there’s a lot of topical song on this. I didn’t plan that but there’s a lot of disturbing things going on in the United States, politically and socially.” – Jesse Colin
11. “It’s funny, I played in Greenwich Village with Tristan and our drummer Donnie Hogue at this free concert in Central Park that they do all summer. About 6000 people came. It was not the usual audience that I would have in a smaller venue, they were younger and they sang Get Together and they sang it stronger than I have ever heard it sung in my career. It shocked me.” – Jesse Colin
12. “The first recording I ever made was at prep school, they had a machine where you could cut a one-off record and I recorded Trying To Get To You and then I started writing my own music when I was 15, being locked away in the Monastic boys school that I was attending, and that’s where I learnt to play the guitar.” – Jesse Colin
13. “Colin and Tristan got very close and worked on a lot. That really freed me to just perform, sing and go after it – whether a rhythm guitar track or whenever I felt like singing.” – Jesse Colin
14. “Lyrics sometimes come, and I just write everything down. Then when I read them the next day most of it is kinda lame but there’ll be a few gems in there and so I will pull the gems out.” – Jesse Colin
15. “I wanted to play with these young people and then I realised I wanted to record with them and sing Get Together again – along with all this great new material.” – Jesse Colin
16. “There was no planning there. For example, I knew I wanted to write a song about the environment but I had no idea that it would come as a Cajun waltz. At the beginning, I thought that was peculiar, but that’s the way it came and I got Connie to help me with that because I got stuck.” – Jesse Colin
17. “It’s a quiet, reflective life and after 50 years of touring, I enjoy it.” – Jesse Colin
18. “I write mostly early in the morning before my mind is engaged in the details of the day.” – Jesse Colin
19. “Some songs, but usually topical songs. I decided to do these little acoustic videos. For the first we made, which was called My Hometown, my Labrador, Django, came and curled up at my feet. It was a one-camera video, very simple.” – Jesse Colin
20th of 50 Jesse Colin Quotes
20. “Since I am no longer performing “live” regularly, I make up my workday as I go along.” – Jesse Colin
21. “All days started with the amazing view of Tomales Bay from the house and a trip to the studio to listen to the latest music with fresh ears. Kids were welcome to come along. It was an idyllic life for a musician born in New York City.” – Jesse Colin
22. “These days when I write an important new song, I make a date with my local videographers and we record a simple solo video of the song and put it up on YouTube.” – Jesse Colin
23. “Get Together changed my life. When I heard it at an open mic in The Village, I was in The Youngbloods. We would rehearse every day that we could at the Café Au Go-Go, every day that it was empty in the daytime. I walked in there one afternoon, thinking it might be open for rehearsal and there was a fellow named Buzzy Linhart singing Get Together on stage.” – Jesse Colin
24. “I really don’t like to bear down and play a song over and over. A couple of times through and I’m on my way to being really bored. I think because we had spent the right amount of time crafting their shape we could just concentrate on the magic.” – Jesse Colin
25. “I used to leave my radio on all night, turned way down low so my parents couldn’t hear it, but it was right in my headboard a foot from my head. Then I fell in love with folk music and found the blues and then it started to click.” – Jesse Colin
26. “When I discovered T-Bone Walker, I thought ‘Elvis has been listening to the blues.’ He was the one that brought it anyone who was never exposed to any roots blues. Then there was folk music.” – Jesse Colin
27. “Maybe that’s why it was The Youngbloods version, my devotion to that song, that helped it to become the pure record that it is. There was no pressure to make a single out of that. Nobody had any idea that that would be so big, they left us alone to make a piece of audio art and we got lucky. It never would have been a hit if the country hadn’t of been going through what it went through – it was the right time and the right song.” – Jesse Colin
28. “My wife and I have two children in college who often need some moral support.” – Jesse Colin
29. “With the studio right next to the house, music, and family life were easily intertwined.” – Jesse Colin
30th of 50 Jesse Colin Quotes
30. “Each time Colin had his stuff there – his pedalboards and dobro and Mandotar – he’d say, ‘Gee I’d like to play on this one,’ and then on the next one, he’d say the same. He kept the energy focussed, he’s such a tasty player and he’s a one-pass wonder!” – Jesse Colin
31. “Colin was brought forth by a fellow who used to be my agent. He knew I wanted to record in Nashville and thought about who would be a good producer for me, the first person he settled on was Colin because he comes out of the blues so strongly. He’s a wonderful guy, he has a great personality.” – Jesse Colin
32. “We soon added the multi-talented Jim Rothermel to play flute and saxophone and spent the next year recording in my newly built studio next to my Ridgetop home in Marin County, California.” – Jesse Colin
33. “He reminds me of Charlie Daniels who produced Elephant Mountain, for The Youngbloods. Colin did a beautiful job and I think Tristan really helped.” – Jesse Colin
34. “It was a bold move for us to make our new West Coast base in the rural countryside of Marin and one that opened up a whole new life for me and my bandmates.” – Jesse Colin
35. “The album has a lot of energy and part of that belongs to them. I noticed that when I play with them live, the energy of the band would lift me up and I’d come off stage and feel like I was 40. We kept the tapes that were the most magical or the most powerful and Tristan was involved in a lot of the work with the producer, Colin Linden, to keep the magic and patch up the mistakes.” – Jesse Colin
36. “There are three love songs. Some songs were pushed aside as not really fitting in with the group, but in some ways, it just happened and we were able to make. Then, when we started listening to it, had we came up against something that was either lame or didn’t fit anywhere I think we would have pushed it aside.” – Jesse Colin
37. “The recording of Song For Juli was a time of major musical transition for me.” – Jesse Colin
38. “The songs for Song For Juli were all inspired by the grand adventure of living on a ridgetop in West Marin and being a father to my daughter Juli and my newly born son Cheyenne.” – Jesse Colin
39. “The last song we released was “Lyme Life” back in December. It is about living with Lyme disease which has been my fate for the last 15 or 20 years. In America, there is a lot of misinformation and misdiagnosis of this disease which creates needless suffering. So I try to help with my music.” – Jesse Colin
40th of 50 Jesse Colin Quotes
40. “I moved to the East Village in 1961 to attend New York University which was right in Washington Square in Greenwich Village. Coffee houses were opening up on St. Marks place and the Folk scene was gently exploding.” – Jesse Colin
41. “I wanted to write something about how much lying there is on television, so that came first, and Shape Shifters the title probably came to me and I just worked on it as a song until it came out. Then sometimes I would get a line.” – Jesse Colin
42. “If it’s warm enough, I might take a short ride on my Triumph Scrambler and then have lunch with Connie.” – Jesse Colin
43. “It’s really a song-by-song process. One of the triggers would be a chord progression that I’d never used or heard before.” – Jesse Colin
44. “I was diagnosed with Lyme disease in 2009, I’d probably had it for 20 years before that. I had to take some time off and get better and it was a slow process.” – Jesse Colin
45. “Then, in 2016, my son Tristan was graduating from Berklee College of Music and I went to his senior recital. He had put together a little band and I just sat there and they blew me away. I immediately thought, ‘I want to play with young people like this’.” – Jesse Colin
46. “By 1962 I had dropped out of school and was playing in the ‘basket houses’ in the village where you play and pass the basket.” – Jesse Colin
47. “I do my best to create a path but then things change and we come upon parts that I thought were cool, playing by myself, that don’t really fit or are awkward with the band, so everyone was involved in that.” – Jesse Colin
48. “We were going for magic and we had our tunes formed and had done our work with them. I have a squash court in South Carolina and we have a little recording set-up there, so we could listen and make sure we were headed in the right direction.” – Jesse Colin
49. “Strong British tea in the morning and a walk with my marvelous Labrador is the way I start most days. Then I might work on a song or just practice the guitar.” – Jesse Colin
50. “I was present for the mastering of Song For Juli. Connie and I rented a plane and took the original masters to a mastering lab in Nashville called ‘Welcome To 1979’. They have a recently refurbished Neumann lathe, the same equipment that was used in the original mastering of all my records in the ’70s. Cameron James Henry did a super job of bringing this precious music back to life in the vinyl grooves. The albums Light Shine and Songbird will follow the release of Song For Juli on Audio Fidelity at 2-month intervals as well as On The Road and The Perfect Stranger.” – Jesse Colin
Summary
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