The music I want to hear in my head sounds somewhere between Jimi Hendrix and Massive Attack. It's not really like my dad, but there will always be similarities because we have the same vocal cords, and I learnt the guitar the way he taught me.
Bryan Adams might not be what I want to put on, but he's a pop singer with a great voice and great guitar tone. Plus, he's done more for Canada than Rush have, because he works all the time. I envy him for that.
I just have some restaurants to just go and eat there. Do mean places to watch people? I like to go shopping look for guitars and stuff with my friends. Look at Meyer, great old instruments, talk about pedals and stuff.
I'm a guitar player, really - I mean, first and foremost - I grew up with all that great 1960s music, in terms of growing up, becoming a musician, so it's like first-love stuff; I'm always going to go back to it.
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.
Reading a book about management isn't going to make you a good manager any more than a book about guitar will make you a good guitarist, but it can get you thinking about the most important concepts.
I'm not a really good classical guitarist by any means, but what I learned from this is a way of working very slowly on solo pieces and I enjoyed working on these pieces of John's. They were not written for solo guitar but a lot of them were easy to ...
I listen to other guitar players, yeah. It gives me new concepts and shows me where the instrument is going for the future and it is going some places. There are some musicians who are really putting out a good vibe with new theories. I try and keep ...
I developed this fantasy world. I found that that was much more fun and more interesting and exciting than real life was to me. Then, once I got the guitar going when I was a teenager, I set sail for the direction I've been in my whole life.
I went to my friend's house one day, and he had an electric guitar he had just bought with a tiny little amp. I turned the volume up to 10 and I hit one chord, and I said, I'm in love.
Every demo I do has a mandolin or resonator on it - some element of the bluegrass or classic country world that I grew up listening to and that first drew me in. And then I always try to find somewhere for a bluesy guitar sound, because that's also w...
Years from now, after I'm gone, someone will listen to what I've done and know I was here. They may not know or care who I was, but they'll hear my guitars speaking for me.
So, once I get writing I really try and put five to eight hours a day in my room with a guitar to really try and come up with stuff that feels interesting enough to me to keep it.
Maybe its a case of one guitar feeling a certain way to the hands that makes one subsequently move differently over the strings, but my intent is always to wring the maximum emotional resonance out of the object in hand.
Collaboration is much like a birth. The song that springs forth resembles each one of us to a degree, but it's the kind of thing that would never be born from just one of us sitting down with a guitar.
I most enjoy sitting down with the acoustic guitar and just fiddling around and trying to come up with something like a hook or some sort of melodic line. That's something that I do habitually.
But that guitar is the perfect companion to the human voice. You rest it against your gut, against your heart, and when you strum it the vibrations go outwards for all to hear, but the vibration also hits you on your body.
I just like simplicity. I like simple songs, I like simple chords, simple vocals, simple lead guitar. I just like simplicity. That's just the way I like it.
I'm seeing and hearing lots of B to B instruments, and everybody isn't, you know, using them... a lot of these guys are trying to do it on conventional guitars, although that has its own sound, and maybe its okay.
My stuff was more of a folk coffeehouse thing, with more acoustic guitar, just me doing a single, and then adding on instruments and voices, with emphasis on lyrics and singing and light kind of acoustic jazz.
The rest of the band were basically friends, So it was me following them around and begging them to let me be in their band for two or three years. And they finally let me in on the harmonica, actually, and then the keyboards, and finally the guitar.
