Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Something people might not know about me is, I like playing the guitar.
I'll watch the Grammys and think, 'You hardly even see people playing guitar,' and it freaks me out.
Branching out to other genres - I think it's why people put me apart from other guitar instrumentalists.
I get why people want to come see me play guitar, but I still don't understand why people want to interview me.
A lot of people said to me, 'Enough with the guest vocalists for a while. We want to hear the Mexican play the guitar!'
When I first started playing guitar, so many people told me I couldn't do this or couldn't do that. But I kept at it and ignored that.
People started to ask me, 'Do you really play guitar?' They thought it was a prop. It was just interesting, because of all the imaging stuff.
In a way, I created Utopia as a platform for me to become more of a guitar player and less of the kind of balladeer that people were taking me for.
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.
I've got my own style on the guitar, sure, and I play rhythm in a certain way, and I use certain inflections. People have said that to me, and I understand it.
I'm glad there are a lot of guitar players pursuing technique as diligently as they possibly can, because it leaves this whole other area open to people like me.
I've never really been schooled in music theory. I'm a guitar player, and I attack the guitar in a certain way that it not fully unique to me, but it's more unique that some other people.
When I plug in my guitar and play it really loud, loud enough to deafen most people, that's my shot of adrenaline, and there's nothing like it. That's what it's always been for me - to be the flame the tribe dances around.
When I first learned guitar - when I was 14 or 15 - I had an older cousin who showed me some stuff. And he was into all these tunings. He was showing me tunings that people like David Crosby or Neil Young used - like dropped D and open D tunings.
I don't understand why some people will only accept a guitar if it has an instantly recognizable guitar sound. Finding ways to use the same guitar people have been using for 50 years to make sounds that no one has heard before is truly what gets me off.
My guitar heroes are Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck and people like that - so I've tried to make an album of Robert Johnson covers that, well, while not totally faithful for blues purists, is faithful for people like me that grew up with the '60s and the electric blues-rock versions of Johnson's songs.