Joe Walsh

[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.

We open our minds, stretch forth, take chances and venture out musically to arrive at something new and different.

A melody is not merely something you can hum.

Blues purists never cared for me. I don’t worry about it. I think if it this way: When I made ‘Three O’ Clock Blues’, they were not there. The people out there made the tune. And blues purists just wrote about it. The people is who I’m trying to satisfy.

I used to play – when I first started trying to be professional, I disk jockey from 1949 to 1955 in Memphis, Tennessee, and I was quite popular there as a disk jockey.

I learned my songs from the birds of the Brazilian forest.

There are no natural barriers. It’s all music.

The reward for playing Jazz is playing Jazz.

Anybody can write music of a sort. But touching the public heart is quite another thing.

There’s always this sound out there that’s just a little beyond my reach and that just sort of keeps me going.

I’d take my guitar and play on the streets. A gospel song would get me a pat on the head. But a blues would get me a dime. So you see why I stuck with the blues.

Music should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise. It’s easy to rediscover part of yourself, but through art you can be shown part of yourself you never knew existed. That’s the real mission of art. The artist has to find something within himself that’s universal and which he can put into terms that are communicable to other people. The magic of it is that art can communicate to a person without his realizing it.

You must surrender whatever preconceptions you have about music if you’re really interested in it.

If you already have a piece of music ingrained in your body, why would you not play it?

The first time I went to Paris, it just felt like I was home. I didn’t question it.