It took me a long time to accept the idea that the guitar can take the place of a singer.
I like rock music because it's always sonically fascinating. There's never a method to what it needs to sound like. It's just however that instrument comes out that day, whatever the humidity level was in the air, what studio you were at. All that makes that tone that you can't re-create, so each song is like a person.
I don't understand why some people will only accept a guitar if it has an instantly recognizable guitar sound. Finding ways to use the same guitar people have been using for 50 years to make sounds that no one has heard before is truly what gets me off.
I love playing music. And that's what it's all about.
I guess trying to throw my body into the guitar is so natural for me that I don't even know how to explain it. I can't imagine life without it.
When you pick up a guitar, you don't put down your First Amendment rights.
Music expresses - you express yourself with music.
Maybe that's what makes my stuff different, 'cause I write it all on the bass. I can't play but a few chords on the guitar, so the bass works just fine for me.
If you take a violin, you can make it sound 50 different ways. Not just pizzicato and played by the bow, but ponticello, and harmonics, and tremolos. If you take an oboe and play it, there's about one way you can make it sound: like an oboe.
Singing instrumental music is most important because, while you play an instrument, you are singing through the instrument... actually, you are singing inside.
When you have a sense of yourself in space, in your movement, in your muscles, you can express yourself through your body, your instrument. You learn so much about who you are and what your truth is.
Gonna wind it up on my guitar. Gonna make that silver sing.
There's something cool about playing 'Tempted' and then picking up the mandolin and playing 'Dark as a Dungeon' and standing on the classics. It's nice to just let soul rule.
On the song 'Buried Alive,' it's almost like the instrumental is a therapist.
I decided to play the saxophone because it was the most obvious instrument in my family. There were a lot of saxophone players in my family, and there were extra saxophones, so that was an easy one to pick up. It was fun - it was okay - it just wasn't me. It didn't feel like my instrument, so I never followed through.
I express my thoughts through my music.
If I'm playing a violin thing, for instance, I tend to respond to that sound with the way I finger.
All I'm trying to do is simply play guitar and elicit this creativity from the instrument.
I get twitchy if I don't pick up a guitar or sit at the piano every now and then... I have to do it; I don't have a choice.
I think about everything first. I think about the scenario: the story and the characters, what I'm trying to say and I'll think about that for a couple of days until it's all locked in and then when I get to an instrument it'll just fall out. But the song's kind of all ready there in my head.
I was hearing music in my head and trying to play it on the clarinet, but it didn't match.' Then, literally the first day, it did with the saxophone. I was like, 'Oh man, that's what I've been trying to do; this is what it's supposed to sound like.'
Violin was my first form of expression - and is still in a lot of ways.
I feel like people are now praying for some authenticity and some human touch to music. There's no simpler outlet to that than guitar and piano.
God is playing my guitar, I am with God when I play.
When John Coltrane passed, we were in the church for the memorial. Albert Ayler came walking in playing, real out there. He was actually mourning through his horn. Mourning, but it was also like a call to wake up. Wake up!
