Quotes by John Oates

“In the 80s Milli Vanilli was ruined by lip-synching, ... but now its looked upon as enhancing peoples careers. Today the weirder and creepier your life is, the more successful you are. There no longer seems to be any substance [to performers and bands] today. Everybody just wants to be famous. We come from a more traditional old school. Were proud that we sing and play live. We grew up paying our dues, learning from our masters.”

“[Which is why its spectacularly appropriate that The Funk Brothers - Motowns original house band - are opening up for Hall & Oates.] Its a great bill, ... Were carrying on their tradition. So well see when we get into Montreal if were going to play a few songs together.”

“The purpose of this communication is a heads-up,”

“The idea was to take these great songs, take them out of their production style and their dated recording style, and show them for the songs that they are--as if you had just played them on an acoustic guitar. Its all about timeless songwriting, really.”

“It keeps us loose. You go out here and everybodys intense and the expectations are so big, it just relaxes us a little bit. It helps take our minds off of things a little bit.”

“I think weve always prided ourselves and perceived ourselves as songwriters, so it wasnt an album that we felt we had to do, ... But we knew that some day well do an album like that, and it will be fun. Thats what it was really about. It was just the right time to do it.”

“I think what we realized was that we would do songs that either had a personal connection to us or a professional connection to us,”

“This music is like an old friend, one for whom you will always feel a kinship and closeness. When people hear this recording they will understand more clearly the roots of our original songs and perhaps have a bit more insight into where they really came from.”

“We get a lot of the new songs in, but we play a lot of the old classics and even some stuff that people dont expect,”

“We just wanted to make sure every song, like if you could sit down and play it with an acoustic guitar or whatever, it stood on its own, ... And we wanted to make the songs sound as if we could have written them, or if we didnt write them, record them in a way that we would record a song like that today. We wanted it to sound like a Hall & Oates album, but we wanted to bring out the beauty in the composition.”

I may just keep releasing singles til I run out of music, which is kind of cool in a way - as long as people dont go, Oh my God, not another one!

I think its kind of difficult to write a good Christmas song because you have a narrow framework of references that you have to work within, and at the same time you want to do something thats personally original and hopefully somewhat unique.

The Christmas genre is a field thats been well-ploughed.

I have a great family, I live an amazing life.

A good mustache makes a man for many reasons.

To me, when a great band is playing together, its amazing for me.

If you look over the years, the styles have changed - the clothes, the hair, the production, the approach to the songs. The icing to the cake has changed flavors. But if you really look at the cake itself, its really the same.