Frank Fairfield quotes:

I play popular songs. This is not some obscure, unusual music. This is popular music.

I didn't have any intention of playing music for a living or anything like that. I was just not doing well in my head or whatever you call it and drinking too much.

I don't care too much for thinking about the past. The truth is just another story. You can remember it any way you want; it's never gonna be the same twice.

The history of music is nothing more than the history of art-music or classical music, the music that was commissioned by aristocrats.

Essentially any history we have is just a history of aristocrats. We don't have any history of people.

Some guy is good at putting these verses together, and some guy is good at singing them. That's just the way it is.

I just started playing music on the street and walking around with a fiddle, and I think that's kind of when I started being serious - or as serious as it's going to get.

For a while, it was something to try to push at people, playing old murder ballads and being upset about everything I was seeing around me. But now I feel a lot more at peace with it.

I think people like feeling miserable just as much as they like feeling happy.

I've been playing one way or another since I was about three years old. I don't remember not knowing how to play any instruments.

I don't think music is an art any more than cooking food is an art.

There's this food that's evolved over thousands of years and people have made their own kind of thing, but it's not art-food, yet. It can be, but it's just food. It's the thing that people do because they have to, because they need it. I feel music is one of those things, too.

You have a history of art-music that you equate with music. That's what I love about that term art-music. It separates itself from music-music, the music people have always made.

Because I have something to say doesn't mean everyone has to take it too seriously or get too upset that it rubs them the wrong way.

Real music is what I consider to be uncorporatized music, the music that just happens. I feel like that's not a very well-known thing.

No race or civilization of people are just going to say, "Oh, instead of using real meat, let's just mash up a bunch of lymph nodes and put a bunch of weird stuff in it and pack it up in plastic cans and plastic bins, and let's eat that way. That'll be great." People don't choose that.

I feel like there's the people's music, and there's corporate music.

Some people are good cooks and some people are good... I don't see why you have to do all of that.

I was kind of pathetic. That's what got me playing out in the street. I ran out of money and needed more gin for the night.

I really enjoy playing music. I feel like it's something to try to give to people.

I was born or raised in the church, so I guess the first songs I would have played would have been church songs.

I don't associate much with anybody. I'm not big on all the teachings and groups and being a part of something, I guess.

Working in factories and things like that, it just puts a little hair on your chest.

I lived by a bay for a while, and I shucked oysters. Some packing things. You know, just whatever odd job you can find whenever you're moving around. I never really cared much for the franchise kind of work, so I'd try to find things that I considered to be a little more honorable.

I wouldn't consider myself a songwriter at all. Maybe I piece together a certain little thing here and there, but songwriters are people who do this with sheet music.

I'm just a guy that sings songs because that's what he likes to do, I guess.