I never took guitar lessons. I took classical piano lessons from the age of six when we lived in Holland. And when we moved to America, it was just the typical thing except I was really good at it; so was my brother.
This is one of my favorite things about the Underground: the crashing of the cymbals, the screeching guitar riffs, music that moves into the blood and makes you feel hot and wild and alive.
The planet you inhabit is a single plane of infinite dimensions, stretched like a guitar string, and standing before you like a concubine waiting for your command.
The cat hair floated in the air like a sound vibration, and I plucked it like a guitar string. Sometimes I can be so musical I’m like a living love song.
It was my 16th birthday - my mom and dad gave me my Goya classical guitar that day. I sat down, wrote this song, and I just knew that that was the only thing I could ever really do - write songs and sing them to people.
If you want to be negative about the whole thing you can say all guitar bands after the Beatles were just a waste of time because the Beatles were the best. I think it's far better to give new records a try.
If we are going to list guitar influences, the biggest one by far is Wes Montgomery. Also, Gary Burton was obviously huge for me in a number of ways. But beyond that, Clifford Brown, Miles Davis and Freddie Hubbard.
When I listen to a record, or when I'm making a record, I listen to everything. I listen to the drums, the bass, the voice, the arrangement. I listen to the whole piece as an ensemble. I don't only listen to the guitar player.
When I lived in a little flat in Pimlico in 1981, I'd write in the hallway. As you walked in, there was a tiny little recess type thing, hardly a hallway, really, and I'd sit there writing songs with my guitar.
Without the Fender bass, there'd be no rock n' roll or no Motown. The electric guitar had been waiting 'round since 1939 for a nice partner to come along. It became an electric rhythm section, and that changed everything.
The invention of Bob Dylan with his guitar belongs in its way to the same kind of tradition of something meant to be heard, as the songs of Homer.
There comes a point with any collaboration like that where you start having other interests creatively. I was moving in one direction musically, and as a guitar player, Mark wanted to move in another direction. That was essentially the reason we brok...
I quit my band in New York City in 1969 and I got really angry at them. I got angry at one of my guitar players and I dove over the drum set and we got into a fight.
My older sister encouraged me from early on and bought me one of the first guitars I had. She listened to all of the crappy songs that I wrote when I was 8 years old and encouraged me to keep doing it.
I started teaching myself guitar because I loved singing so much. Then one day kind of out of the blue I found I was writing a song. It just happened organically.
Ampeg made incredible guitar heads in the early Nineties and then stopped. And I don't know why. The one we used had a nice clean, warm sound, and it blended well with the other amps that were in the studio.
The song Dakota was first written in Paris. I was doing a promo trip. It was snowing and the hotel room was really cold and boring and for some reason I just had a go of the guitar and the song came pretty quick.
A cello can sound like so many instruments, but it's only one, you know, like a guitar; it has percussive qualities. It can sing like the violin, you know, like a voice.
I am definitely still the same kid that I was picking up the guitar at 15. But, I have definitely learned to be more flexible and roll with the punches. It's such an unpredictable business to be in and it's insane how things change so last minute.
In recording, you're trying to make something work sonically - getting the right inflection on the right guitar sound - and maybe a part that would be musically great doesn't sound as cool. On paper, though, it's all stripped back. The musical idea i...
When I write a song, I always start on acoustic guitar, because that's a good test of a song, when it's really open and bare. You can often mislead yourself if you start with computers and samples and programming because you can disguise a bad song.
