It's really hard for me to sing and play bass.
When I was a kid, my parents gave me piano lessons and guitar lessons for a while, but I was never very good at it. I have big, sort of awkward hands. It's hard to keep going when you don't get any better.
A song just doesn't come on. I've always had to tease it out, squeeze it out.
I tried when I was 13, when my grandparents gave me an acoustic guitar, and I tried for a year. It hurt so much to play. I mean, the fingertips hurt so much, I gave up.
Everything comes out in blues music: joy , pain , struggle . Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance.
If a guitar is too easy for me to play, it makes me too laid back. I like to battle with my guitar.
I've never mastered the guitar. Either I was playing it, or it was playing me; it depends how you look at it. As a kid, the only things I had to do was go to school, do my homework, and play guitar.
I kept playing blues-based music all during the 1980s, and it was tough.
I loved that playing the guitar wasn't easy. It was pain, but it was my pain. And then it became joy. My joy.
Some days you get up and put the horn to your chops and it sounds pretty good and you win. Some days you try and nothing works and the horn wins. This goes on and on and then you die and the horn wins.
I played trumpet for about two weeks. Sixth grade. And I didn't practice. Maybe a little longer than two weeks, but I didn't practice and I was faking it.
A lot of people from my generation can't write songs anymore, or it's really hard and it's an unpleasant experience. I don't feel that way at all.
I play piano and guitar. Acoustic guitar. I tried studying classical guitar when I was 16 but it got really hard. I could never play a lead to save my life.
I try all night to play a pretty note.
I had trouble fitting in, in a musical sense. A lot of drummers get sidetracked by the instrument. It can engulf you.
When I was first starting out, you'd have to bang an old upright piano and stick a mike in it and it would always feed back and you could never turn it up loud enough to be heard and I would beat my hands black and blue and bloody.
I'm always good for starting a bit of a tune and the first verse, but after that I just can never go anywhere. It takes me years, that's why I'm so slow.
I don't know about five guys against the world. It's more like five guys against these three chords, and we're gonna wrestle 'em down no matter what it takes.
The first guitar I ever had was a gut-string Spanish guitar, and I couldn't really get the hang of it. I was only 13, and I talked my grandparents into buying it for me. I tried and tried and tried, but got nowhere with it.
There's always blood on the carpet when I play Beethoven at the piano. I hate playing the piano! And it's so hard to fight for Beethoven's soul! But that's what I have to do!
I hate playing the piano! And it's so hard to fight for Beethoven's soul! But that's what I have to do!
Becoming a musician is a strange thing. It's not all cupcakes and ice cream. You're trying to master an instrument, and you sometimes can't tell if you're getting better. You love it, but you also hate it.
I can't read a note. I have lots of discipline, but I can't sit still at any instrument.
The next film I have is called Miles Ahead, which is about Miles Davis, during a five-year period in his life during which he's struggling to figure out which direction to go musically and in his life. I play a record executive who's there to try to get Miles to collaborate with one of my clients. I'm excited to see that.
In my own life I studied music, not creative writing; I see a novel as music - an opening as an overture, themes and subplots as lines in a fugue. The chance to write a novel about a musician boxed in by all kinds of limitations but who plays out his ultimate struggle for freedom at the piano was irresistible.
