Jeff Beck

I love it when people hear my music but can’t figure out what instrument I’m playing.

I’m an experimenter. It’s rich because every album I’ve done, except for a couple of techno-y records, are different. Really you’ve got to hand it to the Fender Strat, because there are songs in that guitar. It’s a tool of great inspiration and torture at the same time because it’s forever sitting there challenging you to find something else in it, but it is there if you really search.

[Stratocaster vs Les Paul] It’s a totally different animal. One is for very subtle and, I would say, more musical things that you can distract and abuse. You can’t do that with a Les Paul. It’s too delicate. It’s got a very delicate tone; most people don’t ever realize that because they are plugged into monstrous amplifiers which completely, instantaneously covers up the unique sound quality it has. All those years of development go straight out the window when you overload the amp.

I like an element of chaos in music. That feeling is the best thing ever.

I don’t care about the rules, if I don’t break the rules at least 10x every song then I’m not doing my job.

[on Django Reinhardt] By far the most astonishing guitar player ever … Django was quite superhuman, there’s nothing normal about him as a person or a player

The day of the great jazz improviser who doesn’t know how to read music is over.

I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me-like food or water.

The value of music is not dazzling yourself and others with technique.

What we hear is the quality of our listening.

I felt a responsibility to present a viable alternative to the popular electric sound.

I only knew classical music, which to me was the only true music. The only way I could survive at the bar was to mix the classical music with popular songs, and that meant I had to sing. What happened was that I discovered I had a voice plus the talent to mix classical music together with more popular songs, which at the time I detested.

Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.

On my album Here, that’s the first time that I’ve really understood how I could put all the things that were happening in the world and in my life and in our lives as just human beings into one body that was just so powerful and really had a perspective. That was an opening for me and I think that naturally, there is just so much to talk about. I don’t see me getting quiet anytime soon.

Music happens to be an art form that transcends language.

As a little kid, blues meant hope, excitement, pure emotion. Blues were about feelings. They seem to bring out the feelings of the artist and they brought out my feelings as a kid. They made me wanna move, or sing, or pick up Reverend’s guitar and figure out how to make those wonderful sounds.

The melody is generally what the piece is all about.

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.

You never get it figured out. You just keep playing.

I didn’t get my music together until I was 40.

When I cannot sing my heart, I can only speak my mind.