We knew they were going to be coming at us. I think they got their first two goals by getting underneath us in the crease. The first two goals really picked them up. Dom (Lamolinara) just stood on his head when we needed him with that doorstop save and the last pass with four seconds left. Defensively we're just jelling and we've just got to keep moving.
If I pick up a guitar, I don't practise scales. I never have. I come up with something I haven't done before, new approaches to chord sequences, riffs, rhythms, so it becomes composition. It's not like the music I'm doing is just a single thread.
After 'Frampton Comes Alive!' became a huge success, I really needed to take time off to work out what the hell just happened. Instead, I just kept working.
I always lived with guitarists. When they would leave, I would just pick up their acoustic guitars and start doing finger picking and write.
The only person stopping you from doing something is yourself, and looking for excuses all the time just gets in the way of obtaining your own goals. It's like the writer who keeps getting up and straightening the pictures in the room.
I want to do some different kind of songs, but say I want to do riffs, but I don't come up with any riffs that I really think are great. Then I can't do a riff album. I'm more of a song, melody person.
Using string bends instead of just playing regular, unbent notes can definitely help give certain riffs a cooler, heavier edge.
I went to a mosque in Philadelphia with [my wife] in December 24, 1999. And we we went to this mosque in Philly, and I just had such a strong reaction to the prayer. And I was really emotionally - I felt really grounded at that time. And so to be in this prayer and the imam is doing the prayer in Arabic and I don't understand a word of Arabic but I just remember these tears just coming down my face and it just really connecting to my spirit in a way that felt like I needed to pay attention to that.
I don't really break into too many solos. But I've never been a super-big solo guy anyway. I like to make the main melody guitar lines of the songs as cool and interesting as possible without just strumming chords. I like to have chords intertwined with riffs here and there, but I'll do the riffs and the solos where the bottom will drop out. Basically, I do everything for the song, I don't do it for the solo glory. Kids aren't really into that anymore for some reason.
When I was younger I would have told you it was my genius, but now I don't believe that for a second. Music just comes out of you, it flows through, it's weird. If you think about it intellectually, how does someone come up with two hundred riffs over their life time?
Since the trade, I was just thinking about this day and mentally preparing to not get too excited. I knew I was going to have some extra adrenalin out there so I was really doing what I needed to do just to stay calm, you know, just try not to do too much.
The blues appealed to me, but so did rock. The early rockabilly guitarists like Cliff Gallup and Scotty Moore were just as important to me as the blues guitarists.
The spirit around leaving New York, for me, was that I just felt I needed to do something really outside of my comfort zone. And I really couldn't tell you at the time why I needed to do it. It wasn't like I was running from something dark; it was a desire to shake things up.
When I go to places and do book tours, I don't really like doing traditional bookshops. It's nice to walk people through something instead of just standing up in a bookstore.
I used to want to look like every European person that was being held up as a standard of beauty, whether in the industry or in life. Then I just realized that it's not in my genetic make-up. I decided instead to go for the gold in whatever I'm doing and just be as healthy as I can be.
42. Most people will spend their lives doing jobs that they don't particularly enjoy, and will eventually save up enough money to stop doing those jobs just in time to start dying instead. Don't be one of those people. There's a difference between living, and just surviving. Do something that you love, and find someone to love who loves that you love what you do. It really is that simple. And that hard.