Joe Bonamassa Quotes

As a singer, you have to bring the soul to the song.

Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.

The way Will Moore taught me, and the way I play it, the blues is just something different.

I have often heard the statement made by foreign singers, as a demonstrated fact, that the German artists are artists in feeling indeed, and serious in their devotion, but that their singing is crude.

My template for most songs is 'Is this inspiring?' and with the blues it so often is.

Obviously, a bass sounds like a bass and a guitar sounds like a guitar, but the way you play the guitar reflects your personality.

I then realized that I could never be satisfied again with the mere natural charm of my voice, that I had to constantly paint when singing, melting all the colors, expressing reds and blacks that had to be less primary but bursting with subtly colored combinations.

The value of music is not dazzling yourself and others with technique.

But if you listen to great piano players, both classical and jazz, there's a huge range of dynamics and colors and emotional expression that's possible with the instrument.

Wagner manages to convey emotion with music better than anyone, before or since.

I learned, too, how it was possible with the help of the picture and action to transform an apparently insignificant violin passage into an incident, and to lift a simple horn call into a thing of stupendous significance by means of scenic emphasis.

The songs in 'Wonderland' don't have a melodic life for me - I'm not a musical person - but they have an emotional life, an emotional echo perhaps.

If you can't play the blues... you might as well hang it up.

As a guitar player, it's harder for me to impress somebody than it is to write a song that they like.

You see the genius that Whitney Houston has as an interpreter of material, and you realize why genius can be applied to only a few interpretive performers. She finds meaning and depth and soulfulness in a song that often the writer and composer never really knew was there.

There's nothing but spirit in music. That's all it is. Yeah, there's a lot of intellectual elements to it, but no matter how you approach it, it's all spirit.

To do art, one thing should always remember - subjects of people in misery have deep meanings.

When you break out the acoustic guitar, the words are the focal point unless you're the Jimi Hendrix of the acoustic guitar. So the words have to have meaning.

I'm not trying to be flippant here, but I just play the guitar, don't I? That is my characteristic, and it's my identity as you hear it.

I make music for people to relate to and to connect with me. I want to tap into different emotions.

Just because you have developed the craft on your instrument doesn't mean that you don't have the ability to be expressive emotionally on that instrument, or vice versa.

You can hear songs that are technically great, songs that tick all the boxes. But for a song to be felt, you need something else.

The whole deal with my music has been the emotional quality.

I found I could speak through the guitar. Because you have the feel of the strings with both hands and it's up against your solar plexus, it's real, and so there's nothing between you and the music.

I can hear the youthfulness of my playing on, say, 'Hold The Line.'