I had piano lessons at five and started guitar at ten, but although music and acting was always around me, my parents never pressured me into it.

Blues music is becoming more and more popular than it ever was. I'm always meeting people on the road that are really young, and are guitar players. male and female.

I started out in the folk music world only because of the way my songs were written and performed, with just an acoustic guitar, but I always related to the rock n' roll lifestyle.

I thought there couldn't be a better backdrop for some kind of powerful music than a big orchestra. My wish to hear how a guitar would sound in front of an orchestra has always been there.

We've always described our sound as a bit more guitar driven than normal pop music. Kind of Pink in a boy band form. We've heard a few people say that so now we use it. I think Pink is amazing person to be compared to.

It took me a while to get an electric guitar and a bass and amps and stuff. Playing the acoustic guitar was much easier and more affordable. But I was always listening to the radio and was interested in all the rock and pop music.

There were times I used to go to parties when I was, you know, like 15-, 16-years-old, and I'd always bring my guitar, and all my friends would be like, sing one of the Smokey songs. And everything I sang was his music, and I could sound just like him.

With seven boys and one sister, there was always a lot of music in the house. A few of my brothers were playing instruments, so it was from hearing that, coupled with discovering early rock, which triggered me to pick up a guitar and try to pick out the notes.

What Jimmy Page did was pretty inspiring for guitar players. He married a lot of acoustic elements into hard rock. The kind of chords he used were very left of center, with a lot of dissonance - I absorbed that like a sponge. It's all over the music I write, always.

I grew up playing guitar and writing music, and I always wanted to be a songwriter and a singer and play the guitar. But while I was finishing college, my drag became lucrative, so I had to pursue what was going to pay the bills - and doing comedy as Trixie was something that I was able to market.

I've always been much more of a guitar picker, but I began to feel forced into a position of being the epitome of a rock & roll guitarist. Originally, TYA wanted to make it without having to compromise to pop. It worked for a while, but after five or six years, the fun went out of it for me; a lot of the music went out of it.

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