Dwight Yoakam Quotes

I live out of cans a lot. But I try to indulge only in healthy canned food.

- Dwight Yoakam

A voice expressing emotion in a musical way moves on. It's like the finale of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - the world turns in on itself, as a universe unto itself, in the shape of one human being.

- Dwight Yoakam

It became a metaphor for the lives of the people in this film and for the Old West, for the abandonment that occurred in the early part of the 20th century.

- Dwight Yoakam

My parents were not affluent people and were not - didn't come from the extremities of education. My mother had a high school diploma. I often think I so wish she'd come out of the hills in Appalachia and been able to go on to college. I think she would have made a wonderful teacher.

- Dwight Yoakam

Music's the one thing I try not to analyze. I don't want to destroy the magic that has always been there for me.

- Dwight Yoakam

At the end of the film Val suggests there may be a way to rejoin the living, when he says, 'Let's see if we're able to live among the living, walk among the living.'

- Dwight Yoakam

Film acting has been a very pure experience, because you have to give the purest form of yourself as an artist.

- Dwight Yoakam

The actual work of recording a record or making a film just requires that you consciously block the time out to do that and nothing else. That's what I do.

- Dwight Yoakam

My music is very personal. I've created it in solitude. I face a white wall and beller. I like that sound - the expression of loneliness. That's what it's all about.

- Dwight Yoakam

I think actors are at the mercy of the opportunities presented to them. So you kind of have to wait for them to choose you. My music is insular - I can choose that.

- Dwight Yoakam

In the past 3-4 years I've developed a habit of keeping numerous small cassette recorders in my house and in a bag with me so that I'm able to commit to tape memory song ideas on a constant basis.

- Dwight Yoakam

I tried to pay some small tribute to A Man and a Woman (1966) with the recurring musical theme.

- Dwight Yoakam

It varies from song to song, although Buck Owens and I recently collaborated on writing a duet together and am looking forward with a great deal of anticipation to recording that track for the new studio album.

- Dwight Yoakam

But that is a valid, continuing service that that music - which is, in some cases, 80 or 90 years old - is rendering. And proving its own timelessness.

- Dwight Yoakam

Quality is timeless: It will clearly define itself. And so I make reference to and acknowledge things that I feel have been dismissed, trying to restate those musical and cultural elements clearly and vehemently.

- Dwight Yoakam

I am probably the last of a generation able to gain an education in country music by osmosis, by sitting in a '64 Ford banging the buttons on the radio.

- Dwight Yoakam

We started shooting, and then Jodie found out she was pregnant. Forest broke it to me - he'd gone to work and heard it on the radio! It seemed like the movie was doomed. But, like these characters, there was a disregard for all the signs along the way.

- Dwight Yoakam

It's meant to reaffirm the validity of that music - clean, minimalist, honest, classic music.

- Dwight Yoakam

As a writer, I always tend to take the liberty and the great artistic luxury of a composite form of writing.

- Dwight Yoakam

I'll never quit playing country music, or at least acknowledging it, always, as the cornerstone of what I am.

- Dwight Yoakam

Fortunately any of the songs we've recorded can be extremely fulfilling to perform depending on the variety of circumstances that surround any given show.

- Dwight Yoakam

I can't escape being born in Pike County, Kentucky, grandson of a miner, Luther Tibbs, and his wife, Earlene, and traveling as a child up and down Route 23 between Kentucky and Columbus, Ohio, where I was raised, experiencing life via working-class people. Nor do I want to escape.

- Dwight Yoakam

Ironically, the success I've experienced at country radio has left me ostracized from pop and other formats of radio.

- Dwight Yoakam

I played music and sang from my earliest memories. The first pictures of me show me wandering around with a guitar that was larger than I was, and it became almost second nature to me.

- Dwight Yoakam

In addition, I'm finishing a track for the movie 'Waking Up In Reno', but there are numerous other singers I look forward to recording with in the near future.

- Dwight Yoakam

When I was in junior high, a foreign-history teacher started a theater class. So I got my feet wet there and through high school, so I was very fascinated with acting as a means of expression.

- Dwight Yoakam

However you arrive at the ability to ignore self-doubt - if you can acquire it or possess it or find it or discover it - move beyond self-doubt.

- Dwight Yoakam

I was very fortunate in having David Fincher, the director come to me. Now I've seen the finished product, I feel that every bit of the nine months we spent on the film was worth it.

- Dwight Yoakam

Country music originates with the colloquial, rural aspects of white America. It's really, truly, rural white America's blues.

- Dwight Yoakam

As an artist, you have to maintain focus and eliminate the distraction of second-guessing yourself based on the opinions of others.

- Dwight Yoakam

I embrace country music because of love, a love of what I came from.

- Dwight Yoakam

To me, the hook of the riff is what makes a great guitar recording. It's the backbone of the whole song. When you have a strong riff, it's the rocket fuel for the track.

- Dwight Yoakam

'm really proud of it. To me, it's a movie about character behavior and the pecking order of the pack, as well as the central character's massive survival guilt.

- Dwight Yoakam

I've always been just kind of consumed by my own thoughts.

- Dwight Yoakam

No compression or as little as possible - that's how you get a good recording.

- Dwight Yoakam

We share something in common with the fabric of the whole universe that connects us.

- Dwight Yoakam

Musicians exist independent of any of the marketing terms or the categorization.

- Dwight Yoakam

I don't regret any of the musical decisions I have made.

- Dwight Yoakam

I like order. It allows me to have chaos in my head.

- Dwight Yoakam

Control success before it controls you.

- Dwight Yoakam