I feel like guitar explains a lot. You can just listen to a guitar without any lyrics over it; you can just feel what kind of track it is. If it's pain... you can feel it. It sets the mood.
I'm trying to enlarge what I do with my voice, not through technique but just through the sounds. I think we all make noises, and particularly when we get involved or emotional about something, the colors and the tones of those noises change.
For me, Heaven is evoking emotions through sound.
The sound of the mandolin is a very curious sound because it's cheerful and melancholy at the same time, and I think it comes from that shadow string, the double strings.
that voice was a deathless song.
Jimi Hendrix is the greatest guitar player in the world... a guy who mastered that instrument. It was talking when he played. And when he did a solo, he made the guitar cry - or made it sound like it was coming from the devil's amplifier.
Sound comes out of a life experience.
When I listen to most forms of music, in their most raw and pure, it all has a punk edge to me, like Lead Belly, Jimmie Rodgers, Otis Redding or Nirvana.
Brass has a very distinctive sound. It's delicate but powerful, but it's also melancholic and plaintive.
I like the idea of imagining a sound and feeling a sound and then having it come out through your body, through an instrument. That's an important way to make music.
