What your sound is, is a feeling.

“What your sound is, is a feeling” is Teddy Price’s compact account of musical identity, recalled by Billy Dunne during a discussion of recording. The expression shifts attention from technique alone to the emotional quality a performance carries—and from the urge to perfect a sound toward the possibility that its character is already present in the playing.

Meaning in the Recording Process

Billy remembers questioning whether the band should record another take or keep adjusting the mix. Teddy, by contrast, wanted the recording left as raw as possible and spent time urging Billy to be himself. His statement that sound is a feeling distilled that advice: the goal was not endless refinement, but a performance whose distinctive character could survive without being overworked.

The Exchange About Feeling

Billy asked what feeling Teddy meant. He expected a recognizable image of romance or danger, something like taking a girl home from a bar or speeding with the top down. Teddy did not supply one. He called the quality ineffable, adding that if he could define it, he would have no use for it. The contrast makes the phrase more than a claim that music expresses emotion: its central quality resists being translated into a neat verbal explanation.

Billy’s Recollection

Billy says Teddy’s answer stayed with him. Recalled in the book’s interview-based account, the exchange presents the phrase as lasting guidance rather than a passing studio remark. Its practical force rests in the tension between Billy’s impulse to keep revising and Teddy’s insistence that the sound’s feeling mattered more than making it polished or explicitly describable.