Jake Shears Quotes

Queen is my all-time favorite band in history. I was an obsessive growing up after I discovered them at 10 at summer camp.

I don't think I thought I was going to go into music, and I don't think it hit me until I was 13 or 14, and then I was gone. Just like that. At that point, there was nothing else that could keep my attention.

The first CD that I ever bought was 'Britney Spears.' It was at a 7-Eleven and I was like, 'Can I get this?' It was literally her EP and I picked it up and, of course, I fell in love with her. It was an early crush for me.

When I was growing up in the early '70s and really getting into music, waiting outside the record store for that 45, waiting for a single from The Dead, The Clash, David Bowie, or T-Rex or something to be there. There was something about that that was so special.

I have this image in my head of me in the house I grew up in, and hearing this incredible music on the television show, going over to it, and there's Jon Hendricks, Dave Lambert, and Annie Ross. It knocked me out of my socks, and I'm still in flight.

I spent a lot of time in Tower Records. I'm a huge music nerd, and Tower was instrumental to me when I was growing up.

You know you're a hopeless record nerd when your time travel fantasies always come around to how cool it would be to go back to 1973 and buy all the great funk and jazz and salsa records that came out that year on tiny obscure labels and are now really rare and expensive.

I was buying Bob Dylan mainly, everything I could get hold of by him.

Somebody had given me a copy of 'Hunky Dory,' which had yet to be a hit, although it was starting to percolate. I'd seen a couple of pictures of David, with his interesting hairdo and outfits, and I decided to seek him out, which wasn't difficult back then, as he was eager to do any kind of publicity.

I picked up the guitar at 12 yrs old - basically, my mother and father bought it for me for Christmas. I played one at my friend's house; when I say played it, I just played around with it at my friend's house. It just struck me as something I really wanted.

I really didn't get obsessed with Bowie until my freshman year in high school. I remember listening to 'Starman' and thinking it sounded like it was a song for kids, like a lullaby. The Thin White Duke is my favorite look that he created.

As a child, I was this record collector/listener that would sit in a room and listen to the entire Beatles catalog alone, over and over and over again.

From dancing around to Michael Jackson and Madonna as a kid to having my mind blown by the first sounds of punk and indie rock, to getting to play my own songs and have people listen, music is what got me through.

Michael Jackson's one of my favorite artists of my whole life. In fact, I think he is my favorite. It's one of the first things I fell in love with before I learned about genres and before I knew what was cool to like.

There's a place in England called Petticoat Lane, and... they always used to get the heavy albums, like, a week before. So I went down there and got it, and I went back home. I didn't come out of my room for about three days. I just played it nonstop... 'Sgt. Pepper's' was the best thing I'd ever heard in my life.

The first rock record I ever bought was 'Great Balls of Fire.' I was real little, and I went to Atlanta to get it.

The first artist whose music I really got into was Paolo Nutini. When his album 'Sunny Side Up' came out, I think I listened to it on repeat for, like, six months.

So, when I was eight or nine my mom's friend gave her a big purple bag full of cassettes and I found Seals and Crofts' 'Summer Breeze'... When I found it I stopped going through the bag because I was like, well, I'm not going to find anything better than this. I just thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard.

David Bowie - I definitely knew some of his music as a teenager, but I didn't actually listen to his music as much until I was in my 20s.

David Bowie has always been my vocal inspiration ever since I was a child.

Listening to my dad playing guitar along to 'Sleepwalk' by the Shadows was probably the first time I discovered emotion in music.

I actually wanted to be a jazz musician first. My grandparents introduced me to Louis Armstrong. I loved Louis Armstrong so I took up the trumpet and just did that every day and practiced that.

You want to figure out how you want to play the guitar; what your niche would be. Well you just start digging deeper. When you're digging deeper in rock and roll you're on a freight train heading straight for the blues.

The record [American Idiot ] felt special to us, when we recorded it, with all of the artwork and the concept behind it and it being a rock opera, but we didn't really know where it was going to go. It's like I always say, you just follow the music. Not only was American Idiot a special moment for us, but it also led to Ordinary World, too.

I told Grant Hill back there – I just got done playing against him – as a second grader I had a Pistons Grant Hill jersey. That was the first time I walked into a gym. That’s when I fell in love with the game. My mom, I think she just wanted to get me and my brothers out of the house for a few hours. When I walked into the gym, I fell in love with the game.