Music is a verb.
It’s easier to copy someone else than to find out how to avoid sounding like someone else.
I don’t try to please when I play. I try to cure.
Even when you write it, someone’s got to play it. So if you can play it and bypass all the rest of the things, you’re still doing as great as someone that has spent forty years trying to find out how to do that. I’m really pro-human beings, pro-expression of everything.
I think that those elements – light and sound – are beyond democratic. They’re into the creative part of life.
The human being receives the pleasure from music, not from the argument over what it is.
I don’t know what they’re thinking about. Just because someone says, ‘I like what you do’ or something: They might like it today and tomorrow they might not. I’ve had that experience with record companies.
I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light. Then I’m grateful.
I don’t have a favorite song that I’ve written. But I do have a favorite song: ‘Always on My Mind,’ the Willie Nelson version. If I could sing it like he do, I would sing it every night. I like the story it tells.
I like chords that are very lush with all the lush parts taken out.
The guitar and the dog, in order not to be separated from man, have submitted themselves with resignation to the worst alterations of size and appearance.
She’s Dynamite’ was a 100 years ago, and I recorded that song because the company thought that it was a great song and it was hot. That was the beginning of rock n’ roll, and I guess they thought it would be a BB King version of rock n’ roll.
The people who know nothing about music are the ones always talking about it.
Blues is a tonic for whatever ails you. I could play the blues and then not be blue anymore.
True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.
One of the problems of people who live with pain is that they spend the whole day thinking about it, and it’s exasperating. But even when I am having a bad moment and I can’t get myself together, I get on stage and for an hour or two the pain becomes super-small. It’s about controlling the mind, telling the pain to step aside. Music does that. It’s the most fantastic drug in the world.
I have a deep respect for harmony, melodic patterns and form.
After the music is over it’s gone in the air. You can never capture it again.
Jazz Improvisation means that practice is not as straightforward as it would be when you simply have a score to play.
If the audience doesn’t hear what is going on, is it going on?
An entertainer pleases others while an artist only has to please himself.
I use the audience as my color palette, my instrument.
