Don't try to be someone else. Be yourself.
Just immerse yourself in the culture of the music - it will open some doors for you.
Maybe in my personal life, but as far as my career, I've been offered some humongous things in my career and didn't take them. I look back and think, oh man, well I'd have been well off monetarily wise, but artistic wise I don't know. I'd have to say, personally, in my personal life, yeah, but in my musical life, on twenty-twenty hindsight I would say just take the good with the bad.
I'm a firm believer that you learn a hell of a lot more from your failures than you do from your successes.
I know that for category purposes, people have to lump certain artists in with genre that they make their name or their bones in. Nobody can tell me that Taj Mahal is pure blues. Nobody can tell me that Mike Bloomfield was pure blues. It was a lot of other things going on as well.
I'm just a restless soul musically.
Nowadays it's hard to get somebody to invest the time - everybody wants to be famous rather than be a good musician.
Some of the best advice I was given was that me doing a bad version of me is better than me doing a good version of someone else.
At home in the states, I think there's a tendency in the states to go for the latest, greatest thing. The latest, greatest is the latest greatest. I think when you're talking about France, England, things like that, they look for the history of an artist and they go back when it comes to music like this anyway. They will go back a little bit further. I think the United States is very knowledgeable and it's a good place to play.
When you are sitting in a room and somebody does something or says something and a thought comes, an idea or a melody - you have to just grab it while it's there because it will go away.
I like to say that I had a really good musical education because it was inclusive of all styles of music and I like it like that.
At the school where I went you were able to check out instruments like you check out a library book, if your parents signed for you and vouched for you. Then after you had it for a little while you could decide if you were interested in taking lessons or you could also get your own gear. Or you could turn that instrument in for another one and try something else. So that's how I got my hands on the guitar.
My family was into music. My dad was into music down south. My mom and grandmother were into gospel music so there were all types. That was my inspiration.
For artists like me, I think the times that just say the 80's alone, you didn't have to worry about getting twenty-five thousand Facebook followers. You didn't have to worry about every club, every venue you play, where the venues say well you know can you put up this video, put up that Facebook, put up... Nowadays it's really like you just can't be a musician alone.
Just think about it, be honest, how many groups have you heard of in the last five or six, seven, eight years that you never heard of playing live? You never heard of them making a record. You never heard of them in anybody else's band, and all of a sudden they're the biggest thing going. That to me, that's to me social media music. I'm not saying it's right or it's wrong but it is what it is.
I've worked with a lot of people and I like to play with people when it's fun, and people that I have fun with independent of music, do you know what I mean? Where you can just joke and kid around, because you can joke and kid around with somebody and when you get in the pressure cooker of the studio then you can it's just something.
Nowadays blues in particular has a wide, wide, wide, wide net of everything that's called blues. I think if somebody's coming to it in the last ten years or whatever, or even fifteen years, what their experience is what is called blues is different from mine. I have to expand my range of what's been called the blues. I think somebody who's new to it would have to go back and to see what is called blues now, where it came from. If that makes sense.
