A Quote by Andy Grammer
In a typical day, I would wake up about 8 A.M., pile all my stuff into my mom's minivan - my guitar, my amp, CDs to sell, a table and a rug - drive it down to the street, and unload it all. I'd wait until about 12, then play for two hours. You could only play in two-hour intervals, so then I would move it all somewhere else.
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Growing up, I played every sport I could play, so I didn't have much time, but when I wasn't playing sports, I was definitely playing video games. But my mom used to tell me that I could only play video games for two hours a day and then they would turn off the Internet so I couldn't play online.
I did pretty well busking. I would play two to eight hours a day, and I could make two or three hundred an hour.
A great day on tour would be if I would say a two-hour drive, so you can wake up and you don't have to leave right away. You can go get breakfast somewhere nice that someone recommends in the town, and it turns out to be good. Then you can kind of check out the town, someone might recommend you to a cool thrift store, a record store, a nice park or something. You can have some time to yourself.
When I lived in Hungerford, it was wake up 5:30 A.M., get to the van at 6 A.M. with eight other blokes, drive to Shinfield, which is in Reading, 45 minutes away. Start at 7:30 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. with two half-hour breaks and then home. Train Tuesday and Thursday and then play on Saturday.
I had a few months of physical prep where I was training six hours a day - I was doing an hour and a bit of yoga, I would do a couple hours of cardio and weight-lifting, and then I would do an hour or maybe two of martial arts training.
My Portuguese uncle had a Portuguese version of a ukulele. The family would pull it out after dinner and play Portuguese folk songs on it. I couldn't wait for him to finish so I could get my hands on it. I was seven or eight years old. And he used to have a Fender amp in his house and an electric guitar. I would spend hours making sounds.
The two hours onstage is great. But I can only play a show and then take a night off. I have to sing for two hours, and then I've gotta rest it for a night. So it's the other 46 hours that are just boring as heck.
You'd go in, read the script once for timing and then you would sit around and play games. The sound effects people would come in and we would do a dress rehearsal so they could get the effects and the music cues in place. Then you would wait until you went on the air.
I'm not sure if it's because I'm older and I'm thinking about family more, but I'm trying to set up this thing where I can play in one city for a month, and then write music for a couple months, then play in another city for a month, write music for a month. Just so it's not these two schizophrenic, Jekyll and Hyde kind of things; you don't have to be this monster. You get inspired and you can go write one song from that, and then you go back and play a few shows. If I could've done that in the 90s, I would have.
That's what I've always loved about music, that I could go be another guy for two hours. But ultimately it all comes back to: do you have the songs, can you sing them, do you have a great band that can play them with you? You're charging money to have people come watch you play; I want them to feel taken someplace good or provoked into thinking my way for an hour and a half or two hours. I have been a provoker and I'll probably always be one in the public arena for the rest of my life.
It's much better to play the guitar a half hour a day, every day, than not practice for a week and then jam for five hours one day.
I grew up with a single mom, two brothers, and a sister, and after school, we would play outside then go home for dinner and play videogames together. It's something I enjoy doing, and it's also cheap entertainment compared to a movie or paying for cable. You pay $50 one time for a game, and you can play it as many times as you want.
The thing I hated about it was that you live in your trailer all the time and then they call you and you do maybe two dozen lines. Then they do that for three hours and you wait and wait and wait, and I don't like waiting.
Bourbon Street is like playing, a tourist, you know? It's just a tourist attraction ... those musicians on Bourbon Street, they play all day. They might start at 12 noon and end at 3 in the morning, like, it's like sets, like a job. You go play, take a break, play again, take a break, then later on that night, the club gets busier, then you play some more. There's pride. They're a group of great musicians- and they're holding it down.
I didn't learn how to read and write until pretty late, and it was this very mysterious, incredible thing, like driving, that I didn't get to do. And then I started writing things down on little scraps of paper and I would hide them. I would write the year on them and then I would stuff them in a drawer somewhere. But I didn't start to really read until about eight. I'm dyslexic, so it took a long time.
What interested me about Chuck Berry was the way he could step out of the rhythm part with such ease, throwing in a nice, simple riff, and then drop straight into the feel of it again. We used to play a lot more rhythm stuff. We'd do away with the differences between lead and rhythm guitar. You can't go into a shop and ask for a "lead guitar". You're a guitar player, and you play a guitar.
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