For me there is something primitively soothing about this music, and it went straight to my nervous system, making me feel ten feet tall.
Like a fool, I fell in love with you, Turned my whole world upside down
Musically, he was like an old man in a boy's skin.
If you hand me a guitar, I'll play the blues. That's the place I automatically go.
The thing about pessimism is that in most cases it's nothing more than a front behind which a body can hide its most sweetful yet painful hopes. please forgive mine.
I never set myself too high a goal. It was always tone and feeling, for me.
I am and always will be a blues guitarist
The music scene as I look at it today is a little different from when I was growing up. The percentages are roughly the same - 95 percent rubbish, 5 percent pure.
Watching him, I understood for the first time how you could really live music, how you could listen to it completely and make it come alive, so that it was part of your life.
All I am certain of right now is that I don't want to go anywhere, and that's not bad for someone who always used to run.
Early in my childhood, when I was about six or seven, I began to get the feeling that there was something different about me.
The point of being at home is to be with my family as much as possible.
I mean, it didn't matter to me that there were people, it didn't matter that I was shy Just the sound was so captivating that it helped me to get rid of those inhibitions.
The first one was quite cheap, but that was expensive for us. For my folks to buy on the Never Never. It was quite, you know, a rare object to have and I gained quite a lot of status by having this.
I mean, the sound of an amplified guitar in a room full of people was so hypnotic and addictive to me, that I could cross any kind of border to get on there.
An obsession is where something will not leave your mind.
Music became a healer for me. And I learned to listen with all my being. I found that it could wipe away all the emotions of fear and confusion relating to my family.
Let it grow, let it grow, Let it blossom let it flow. In the sun, the rain, the snow, Love is lovely, let it grow.
When all the original blues guys are gone, you start to realize that someone has to tend to the tradition. I recognize that I have some responsibility to keep the music alive, and it's a pretty honorable position to be in.
I remember when I thought of singing as the bit that went between the guitar playing - something I couldn't wait to get out of the way. Singing was originally like a chore that I didn't really enjoy.
But I did go to music really early on, even when I was 4 or 5, I was responding to music probably in ways other kids were not.
I've got the god given talent or the god given opportunity better put, to let that out in a harmless way you know, and I don't know what it does to you, I don't really know.
A British pressing with a compilation of the best stuff really, I mean actually not only that but, these were all kind of semi hits for the people on it in America.
When you're onstage with an electric band going through a massive P.A. system, it's very artificial. You can't really hear your own voice as it comes out of your mouth.
I think I deliberately sold out a couple of times. I picked the songs that I thought would do well in the marketplace, even though I didn't really love the song.
It's taken me to be an older guy, an old man, to have an old man's voice. Because I only liked old men's voices. As a kid, I didn't like pip-squeaked singers.
There's a desire in me to express something - to match what I hear in my head.
It was a mystery to me, how the tuning was, or the style seemed to come out of nowhere, it obviously had roots in America going way back, there was nothing like it for me I'd ever seen before.
Leave bands, go back to obscurity if I choose to, without a great sense of loss of security because it's all been based on the fact that I did it on my own or was doing, enjoying doing it on my own in the first place.
To sing in a lower key is harder work. You have to use your diaphragm more.
