'I Want To Hold Your Hand' is a great classic by Paul McCartney and John Lennon, I sure love that song. I did like the classic version, a rock-oriented song, then someone heard me do it with the Grant Green approach - Grant Green and Larry Young did it, with a bossa nova beat on the funky side.
Whenever I think I know something is a classic, or an amazing song, I realise it's still so subjective, because you and your friends could be talking about something, say, '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' - an amazing classic song - or someone would be like, "'Hey Jude' is an amazing song!", and I'd be like, "I don't really like it."
You need to have spent your time from playing Top 40 pop rock in order to know how to play a song like 'Ritual,' a song like 'Absolution' or 'Idolatrine.' You need to know your classic drumming and your classic guitar.
Paul McCartney and John Lennon would often write a song a day, so I have the same workmanlike philosophy.
Longer is not my best song, it's just a classic love song, and every songwriter always dreams of writing a classic love song.
'The Beatles' did whatever they wanted. They were a collection of influences adapted to songs they wanted to write. George Harrison was instrumental in bringing in Indian music. Paul McCartney was a huge Little Richard fan. John Lennon was into minimalist aggressive rock.
A classic song is timeless. You'll never outlive a classic song. I'll never put The Beatles 'In My Life' on one day and say, 'That doesnt move me any more.'
When we did the 'Titanic' theme, that song was everywhere. At the time we did it, it wasn't an old song. We didn't really listen to that song. We're not fans of the song. It was more about taking the song everyone knew and making it sound like a New Found Glory track.
I started playing bass in my friend's band for some reason. It was just something I did because, well, he asked me if I wanted to play bass and he played me this song - Nirvana's version of "Molly's Lips", the Vaselines song - and he said, "You can do this! This is not hard!" and it's like a two-note song. I learned that and then I thought I was a genius.
For 'tis green, green, green, where the ruined towers are gray, And it's green, green, green, all the happy night and day; Green of leaf and green of sod, green of ivy on the wall, And the blessed Irish shamrock with the fairest green of all.
My guitar is a mutation between a classic Fender Stratocaster guitar, which I played for years, and a Gibson solid-body like an SG or a Les Paul. It contains all sounds of the basic classic rock n' roll guitars. It does what I want it to do.
A Song of the good green grass! A song no more of the city streets; A song of farms - a song of the soil of fields. A song with the smell of sun-dried hay, where the nimble pitchers handle the pitch-fork; A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk'd maize.
In fact, my favorite Beatles song is "In My Life." And from that, you can gauge that my friends mean so much to me. I love John Lennon, so it's kind of like moody... There's a lot you can gauge from that. As insignificant as it seems, as an actor, it's an interesting way to approach a character.
It was endlessly amusing to me to try to imitate John Lennon and Paul McCartney's harmonies using the guitar.
If you take a song like 'We Will, We Will Rock You,' 'You got blood on your face... ' - he's rhyming on that! And if you take the lyrics out of that song, you get a hip-hop beat. It's a rock song, though. So it's not out of my element for me to get with Black Lips.
When I heard The Beatles, that was my turning point. They were like my mentors. You know, the funny thing about that, when I heard 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand,' at first I said these guys are like a flash in the pan. But the second album, I had to take all that back. John Lennon - one of the greatest writers in the world.
The world is split into two kinds of people, those who would go out for a drink with John Lennon, and those who`'d choose Paul McCartney... After The Beatles came back from India, Lennon wrote "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" and McCartney wrote "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da." End of argument.