When I'm working on a movie, I'm in my trailer playing guitar. And then on the road, I read scripts and think of... it just keeps both fires burning. I kind of need both.
I bought my first electric guitar when I moved to Memphis; a Gibson with a DeArmond pickup which I used with a small Gibson amplifier.
It was really fun. Well, Bobby was just basically a folk singer. He didn't play with any bands or anything, like all the rest of us. Just played his guitar and sang his songs.
As a guitar player, you can gravitate to the blues because you can play it easily. It's not a style that's difficult to pick up. It's purely emotive and dead easy to get a start with.
I'm not the same person as the character I do in my songs. She's crazy! The 'Daddy Song' was the first sketch I ever wrote, especially on the guitar and everything - and definitely the most offensive. And absurd.
In the early days, I had very little idea about arrangements, and I wrote songs a little flat, as it were, just on an acoustic guitar. They didn't really have quite enough nuance.
I'm singing what I want to sing based on the emotion of what that day feels like. That's what comes out of my mouth and guitar. That impacts people. They know anything can happen.
I believe every guitar player inherently has something unique about their playing. They just have to identify what makes them different and develop it.
Well, you know it was so different from when you rehearsed. You're out there with your guitar and trying to get a sound, but it doesn't sound anything like what you expect!
It is the most delightful thing that ever happens to me, when I hear something coming out of my guitar and out of my mouth that wasn't there before.
I played piano in a covers band, but that didn't especially help with girls. There is never a piano around after the shows. Guys with the guitars were the ones who got lucky.
When I first played the guitar without plugging it into an amplifier, the people at Fender were blown away. They couldn't believe the sound. I said, 'See, gentlemen, the world is no longer flat.'
We actually added an extra electric guitar to beef up 'Need You Now', but we haven't changed any of this 'Own The Night' record at all for the international releases.
I got into guitar because no parent will buy their eight-year-old kid drums unless they're divorced and trying to get back at their wife. You know what I mean?
Once I picked up an electric guitar, I lost interest in piano, and I just wanted to rock. I studied piano for so long, I got burned out on it.
I think there'll always be a kid with a guitar with a song in his heart that's going to turn me on - that's as far as I can see. Whether lots of people agree with that, I'm not sure.
I've got four or five records in my head at a time that I try to work on and I would like to do a guitar trio record next - since The Police I've mostly made records with keyboards.
When I read the 'Country Strong' script, I thought, 'Can't they just hand-double it? Can't I just do the rest of the movie and not have to do the performing?' It took me six months to learn to sing and play guitar at the same time.
Probably my favorite artists to listen to James Taylor, Stevie Wonder - I haven't gone back in a really long time and really listened to them - my first guitar influences. It's been awhile since I revisited that.
I would have to say I'm bored with the standard rock, guitar solos, but I've done it for five albums now, and this time I wanted to go in a completely different direction. I wasn't interested in showing off any more.
The concept of clearing one's mind before performing a task so that it is consumed by nothing but that task, yet is open at the same time to anything that might happen - that concept can be applied to playing guitar, and it's enormously helpful for i...
