Keith Richards
Keith Richards
Keith Richardsis an English guitarist, singer, songwriter, best-selling memoirist, and founding member of the rock band The Rolling Stones. Rolling Stone Magazine credited Richards for "rock's greatest single body of riffs" on guitar and ranked him 4th on its list of 100 best guitarists. Fourteen songs that Richards wrote with the Rolling Stones' lead vocalist Mick Jagger are listed among Rolling Stone magazine's "500 Greatest Songs of All Time". The Stones are generally known for their guitar interplay of rhythm...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionGuitarist
Date of Birth18 December 1943
CityDartford, England
Its called a playground, but its nearer to a battlefield. It can be brutal
Most guys I know are assholes. I have some great asshole friends, but that's not the point. Friendship has got nothing to do with that. It's 'can you hang, can you talk about this without any feeling of distance between you?' Friendship is the diminishing of distance between people. That's what friendship is, and to me it's one of the most important things in the world.
You've got the sun, you've got the moon, and you've got the Rolling Stones.
Everybody thinks you reach a certain age and you're a grownup, but it's not true. Nobody grows up until the day they croak.
We do what we want to do. We write songs. We try not to repeat ourselves too much. We have our own sound and our own way of doing things. Up until now it has always been enjoyable. None of the members have ever got to the point where they don't want to be involved in it ... It's not entirely possible for me to stand back and look at the Rolling Stones because being a part of it you can't. I wish that I could just sit in the audience for one night and see the show. Everyone in the band has said that at some point. But then you wouldn't be seeing the whole band. And that's the problem with that.
To a musician or songwriter, your canvas is silence.
I'm all for a quiet life. I just didn't get one.
One of the great things about songwrighting; it's not an intellectual experience
To make a rock'n'roll record, technology is the least important thing.
You're always learning about this thing everytime you pick it up
I consider my job [being a musician] is to have a little idea and nurture it and put it in some form that everybody else can understand and then sort of pass it on. It's really a passing through. In other words, you receive and you transmit.
What is it that makes you want to write songs? In a way you want to stretch yourself into other people’s hearts. You want to plant yourself there, or at least get a resonance, where other people become a bigger instrument than the one you’re playing. It becomes almost an obsession to touch other people. To write a song that is remembered and taken to heart is a connection, a touching of bases. A thread that runs through all of us. A stab to the heart. Sometimes I think songwriting is about tightening the heartstrings as much as possible without bringing on a heart attack.
I looked upon myself, in a sort of romantic and silly way, as like a laboratory.
Rock and Roll: Music for the neck downwards.