Robin Trower Quotes

I was always drawn to the blues. Alberta Hunter at the Cookery was a life-changing experience. I only wanted to get enriched as a performer as I got older, to have an audience which got older, too, and would come to see me when I'm 80.

I'm big fans of all those musicians, B.B. King, Mick Jagger - they're all on my iPod.

Whitney Houston and Ella Fitzgerald are my musical mothers. I learned everything I know about true R&B, pop and jazz singing from these stunning performers and unparalleled musicians.

I used to watch MTV when they played music, and discovered Robert Cray, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jeff Healey.

Dad had four world records, and they happened to be Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Ali Farka Toure. I tried singing like these people, and it didn't work.

What I used to play was rhythm guitar before I saw Jack Bruce. I said, That's what I want to do in life. He was definitely the main influence.

Being around people like Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight, Dionne Warwick and Roberta Flack, all these greats, I was taught to listen and observe.

My musical development stopped when Frank Sinatra died.

When you're talking about your own music every day, listening to bands, going to festivals, you can kind of lose sight of your initial connection with music. Instrumental music - especially jazz - helps me refocus.

From the spiritual came the blues, gospel, and rhythm-and-blues. I heard all of that music growing up, and that has influenced how I approached classical music. I'm sure of it.

I never listen to Led Zeppelin. But, I mean, I don't think Robert Plant or Jimmy Page listen to Led Zeppelin, either. We all probably obsessed over the same old blues records growing up.

I spent a few years here in Memphis, in the late '70s and early '80s, where I was studying a lot of country blues players and their styles. So it seems like every record I'll do, I will appropriate these blues styles that I remember.

For me, everything definitely comes from music.

I think I was probably an early teenager when I discovered Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and a bunch of people that are on a long list of artists. They were important to me, especially as an early adolescent.

When I was a kid, I always looked up to people like B.B. King and Ray Charles.

I started with Sam Cooke when I was 6 or 7 years old.

There were a whole lot, I bought every blues record I could find, it wasn't just one or two people. My vocal influences were Ray Charles and Bobby Blue Bland.

As a kid, looking at Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, New Edition, the Temptations, Motown, people who I felt were huge artists, they made me wanna do something.

I was inspired to play electric guitar from listening to a lot of Carlos Santana, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and B.B. King, and that's always been the kind of music that I gravitate toward.

I just want to play like Jimi Hendrix. I love other forms of music and wish I could play classical piano, or saxophone like John Coltrane, but that will never happen. Because my nature is to play electric guitar really well and to emulate my heroes from the late 1960s.

I was interested in music since I was 14 years old. What really got me started was the first Led Zeppelin album... absolutely.

From a small child to right now - I mean, when I was five years old, Red Norville, Tal Farlow, Charles Mingus, Les Paul, Mary Ford, people like that were coming over to my house. So I was around professional adult mature musicians who had had big careers.

I met musician Ken Farmer in Lorne and he lent me all of his Bessie Smith blues LPs. That's when I started to sing.

If nothing else, we grew up loving the old blues artists and Ray Charles.

We were either listening to jazz or Robert Johnson, the old blues man, but not to our peers.