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
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.
You get onstage and make other people feel happy. Make them feel good.
I read the Bible sometimes, but it bores me to death. I just want to know what other people find so bloody fascinating.
It’s one thing to play a Muddy Waters song. It’s another thing to play with him.
We all have our own personal laboratories. Life is an experiment, and it's just a matter of getting the alchemical or chemical combination right.
What is life but playing with time?