Paul Gilbert Quotes

When I was 11, I decided to start rapping, playing guitar, and writing songs. Everything really blossomed from there.

I started playing guitar before I can really remember, and I started writing really early, too.

I started playing guitar when I was 12 and probably from that age knew that I wanted to make music and make my own music. Playing with other bands like the Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens was more like an apprenticeship for me than anything.

Very unique: I was a singer-songwriter-guitarist. Very unusual in the late Seventies to find a singer-songwriter, and on top of that, a guitarist.

I started playing trumpet when I was 11 years old. All I wanted to be was a jazz trumpet player when I grew up.

I did some stage when I was a kid, around 16 or so. I was living in Melbourne and had a band. I was quite young. We weren't very good. Then I found a band in Perth. We played around for three years. We're in the 'History of Rock'N'Roll,' a book about Perth music.

Steve Van Zandt, the poor guy, doesn't get to play enough as it is with me hogging a lot of the solos. Steve has always been a fabulous guitarist. Back from the day when we were both teenagers together, he led his band and played lead and was always a hot guitar player.

I literally came out of high school thinking that I was going to do something in the sports world because I grew up with a very sports-oriented family. My last year of school, I got involved with playing guitar and singing, and I joined a band and I just decided that year somehow that I was going to play music.

I wish I played guitar so I could start a band with great musicians.

At some point, I had to make a decision: I could practice more and become a really great guitar player or I could work on writing better songs. There are only so many hours in the day, and I found writing songs more fulfilling than working on becoming this virtuoso guitar player.

In a way, I created Utopia as a platform for me to become more of a guitar player and less of the kind of balladeer that people were taking me for.

I always loved rock guitar. I just never put it together that that's what I'd end up doing.

I started writing songs when I was 10. It was a natural way to express myself as a kid. It wasn't until I started listening to jazz, joined the choir and picked up a guitar that my little hobby became something far more serious.

When I got out of high school, I was in a blues band. It was the kind of music I was interested in, and listening to, mostly because it was becoming a vehicle for a generation of guitarists - like Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton. Mike Bloomfield. And that's what I wanted to be, principally: a guitar player.

When I was 5, I started taking singing lessons, and then, after 'School of Rock,' I started taking guitar lessons. I would always write songs and play them for my friends, and I would play my guitar on the set a lot.

I never even held a guitar until I was 23 and living in California, but then loved it. I'm really not an accomplished instrumentalist. Maybe that has something to do with why I write and sing.

I started playing guitar when I was in my late teens, and within two years I was starting to play shows.

I heard the Beatles and the Stones, and Mom bought me an electric guitar. I played lead for four years and then switched to bass. One day someone suggested that I should sing, so I sheepishly stepped up to the microphone and the rest is rock history.

I started playing guitar when I was 14 and eventually gained the confidence to start singing a little bit.

I was probably 7 years old when I started playing the guitar and writing some serious songs.

I wanted to be the best guitar player in the world. And then my dad got me a portable recorder, so I started writing my own music.

I started as a jazz musician, not a singer, then I became a rock 'n' roll artist with Aphrodite's Child.

I wanted to be a guitar player and musician so badly, and I prayed to get this the very few times I went to church, and I feel like I got my prayer answered.

It's hard to get a start as an instrumental guitar player. It's a much quicker route to be in a band, so I was always in a band and writing songs with singers, but I always had the dream in the back of my mind to make an instrumental record.

When I was 14 or 15, I was dead-set on becoming a rock star - the same as anybody who picks up a guitar at that age.