Leo Kottke Quotes

• You can’t really tell what the audience wants but you can tell what will keep everybodies attention in the same place.

  Leo Kottke

• Yes and for two reasons: one, I couldn’t find anything to imitate at the time, and secondly because what I heard on the radio didn’t bear any resemblance to what I wanted to hear on the guitar.

  Leo Kottke

• Yeah, the first thing that comes to mind is not to try too hard.

  Leo Kottke

• Yeah I do and I don’t mind, in fact that is one of the real encouraging things about this whole career of mine is that there are tunes I wrote almost thirty years ago that I will still play in front of an audience and I still like the old tunes.

  Leo Kottke

• When the audience is awful you can still have a great night and people will walk out thinking they had a great time even though there was loads of loudmouths and the sound was terrible.

  Leo Kottke

• When a record company looks at me I’m very hard to market, I don’t really fit anywhere, It’s hard to get me on the air, and I’m hard to demography, but! because of that I’m not subject to trends like you pointed out.

  Leo Kottke

• We spent a lot of time on that record with the sound and recorded it on the Paramount sound stage which is this huge room where the sound is reflected but the reflection is so late and comes from so far away that it doesn’t blur the music but gives you a room nonetheless.

  Leo Kottke

• We had a day off here yesterday and I just sat in my room and played.

  Leo Kottke

• There are nights when you can feel stale because you’ve fallen into a pattern by touring too much, but it’s easy to get out of it by deliberately getting in trouble and playing yourself into a corner to then see if you can get out of it.

  Leo Kottke

• The principle element in a performance is risk, and if you’re losing interest then by scaring yourself to death the audience will feel it and boy it’ll wake them up.

  Leo Kottke

• The first music I was exposed to was Stravinsky and I loved it but I don’t remember it.

  Leo Kottke

• The bulk of my set is instrumental and you have to give yourself and the audience some relief because a performance is not about great guitar playing it’s really about entertainment.

  Leo Kottke

• That was when I found out that you could talk to them and it was a whole other way to blow your stack, and it’s so much fun to perform that you want to do it again and the more you get out of it the better.

  Leo Kottke

• It’s true that the more you put in the more you get out and that has to be there I think, If you aren’t really hooked on your instrument this job would be a hell on earth but if you are, it’s the best.

  Leo Kottke

• It was almost two years after I left Capital that I put out the first one on Chrysalis and that was really instructive because it was no better in particular than any other record I’d done.

  Leo Kottke

• It was a kind of paralysis you would get from tendonitis and I would last about five to ten minutes into the set and it would set in and I really couldn’t play.

  Leo Kottke

• It is not a mystical thing, however, it is obvious and practical and I think that what the performer does is to try to get to that point with every choice you make from the phrasing in a tune to the choice of tunes.

  Leo Kottke

• It depends on the time of the year and who I’ve been talking to, I try to put people in the studio I like.

  Leo Kottke

• I’m not subject to their rise and fall because I’m not accepted by them, so I have my own little curve going on. A lot of it is because of how much I play, I think I connect like when all you had was Vaudeville, I think I have an audience by performing a lot!

  Leo Kottke

• I would say that if you don’t feel like talking to the crowd something is wrong and if you force yourself to talk to them things will happen and to that extent things aren’t choreographed.

  Leo Kottke

Leo Kottke (32)

Birth:	11th September, 1945
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Guitarist

About

Leo Kottke is an acoustic guitarist. He is known for a fingerpicking style that draws on influences from blues, jazz, and folk music, and for syncopated, polyphonic melodies. Kottke overcame a series of personal obstacles, including partial loss of hearing and a nearly career-ending bout with tendon damage in his right hand to emerge as a widely recognized master of his instrument. Leo currently resides in the Minneapolis area with his family.

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Today's Anniversary - 13th January

Births

• 1972 - Nicole Eggert
• 1983 - William Hung
• 1977 - Orlando Bloom
• 1934 - Nick Clooney
• 1961 - Wayne Coyne

Deaths

• 1945 - Margaret Deland
• 1864 - Stephen Collins Foster
• 1885 - Schuyler Colfax
• 1929 - Wyatt Earp
• 2002 - Ted Demme