Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Sometimes it's hard for me to just be the guitar player and lose myself.
My dream is to one day just be me and my guitar. I'm working myself to the core. Who am I, underneath everything else? I'm still on that journey, to find that core.
I taught myself how to play the guitar, I taught myself how to play the drums, and I kind of fake doing both of them. But drumming comes more natural to me, and it just feels better.
I consider myself as a singer first, but something that really helped me come into my own is that there's not a separation between me singing and me playing the guitar. The two fed off the other.
No one ever taught me how to shave; no one ever sat down to watch a Braves game with me. I paid for Yale myself, I lived by myself, I taught myself how to play the guitar. I did this all on my own.
I took one guitar lesson, and they wanted me to play 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' or 'Michael Row the Boat Ashore,' and that was the last guitar lesson that I ever took, so I taught myself what I wanted to know.
I first picked up a guitar when I was ten years old; my parents surprised me with it for my tenth birthday. I started taking lessons when I was thirteen, but only for a few months, and then I just kept teaching myself.
In our local Baptist church, I sang in the choir and formed a gospel quartet. When our minister caught me messing with his guitar, he taught me three positions - one, four and five. After that, I taught myself to play.
I found myself in a meeting on my 13th birthday, which I really had no idea the enormity of, but I was in a meeting with the CEO of Atlantic Records, who sort of signed me right then and there as I was playing guitar for him.
I just always wanted to play guitar. I though that was, like, really dope. And then in high school, I learned how to play trumpet and, like, French horn because if the instrument's right in front of me, I'm going to just teach myself.
If something I do now sounds like something I did in the past, it's because I played it. I can't help sounding like myself. That's going to happen. The things that I play on guitar that resonate with me are probably the same things that resonated with me when I started playing in Joy Division.
Finally I'd found this way where I didn't need a record label; I didn't need to wait for some phone call to tell me, 'Go and do it'. It's like, I'm going to get up with a bag of CDs and an amp and my guitar and make it happen for myself. That was such a liberating feeling, and I think it was the start of everything.