A Quote by John 5
What I do is, I look at rock guitar players, and I say to myself, 'What is this guy doing? What does he have that can inspire me?' I try to see what other people are doing and take what they have and turn it and twist it into my own thing.
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I'm a girl, so every day I have a different opinion about or a different feeling about something that inspires me, but I think the thing that's driven me is I'll take a look at successful people and just try and see what their path was and follow that with my own twist, obviously. I guess I'm inspired by other people who are successful.
The first person who showed me that I could be a maker of music was one of my best friends. It's like, you can't see yourself doing something until you see somebody else doing it. Other people were encouraging me singing, but this was the first time that I could see myself writing songs and playing guitar.
I was doing the wrong thing, at the time I thought I was doing the right thing. It's like if you're dealing with somebody who is high on drugs, they can look back at it and say, "Wow, I was destroying myself." But during the period, they think they're doing the right thing. You just have to let the smoke clear so you can see the whole picture.
Being a female guitar player back in school wasn't great, and I had to change schools so many times. The male drummers and bass players thought it was cool, but male guitar players said, 'It's a guy's thing. You should be doing something else, like playing the harp.'
I try not to think of myself in any category, and I don't ever really try to imagine myself competing with another actor. I just know I want to do the things that I would want to see, and I know the things that turn me on, whether it's on the stage, or it's a play or a film. I just kind of want to keep doing my own thing.
It's good for people to look at me and think, 'This guy is doing his thing and enjoying what he's doing and successful at it and living his life.' And that's what I'm doing, and I'm very happy.
I see myself on top, doing what I love to do, and doing it the way I want to do it. No rules, just doing my own thing.
You want to look at what other companies are doing. It's very important not to be hermetically sealed. But you don't want to look at it as if, 'OK, we're going to copy that.' You want to look at it and say, 'That's very interesting. What can we be inspired to do as a result of that?' And then put your own unique twist on it.
So Bach, Beethoven, Duke Ellington, Thelonius Monk, these are all people who would sort of rearrange or take riffs from people. Same thing with rock, if you look at the Rolling Stones doing a cover of Otis Redding or you know if you look at literature James Joyce is pulling fragments of text from other people.
I like hearing fiddles, steel guitar, acoustics up loud - really rock & roll stuff but with a country sound behind it. That's just who I am. I'm not trying to prove a point; I am just doing what I like. But I don't have any problems with any other artist coming in and doing their own thing.
I have always considered myself a fast learner. I try to retain and absorb as much information and knowledge about the [music] business as I can. I don't want to just sit back and have other people do the hard work for me. I try to be involved in every process of my career as possible. I run my own social media, record, and try to vocal produce myself as much as possible, write my own songs, style myself, and learn the business side. If I didn't do acting or music, I was going to school for business. God has put me on this path and I can honestly say I wake up every day doing what I love.
Buffalo Springfield had three guitar players, and we thought they were so cool. So we started doing the three-guitar thing, and people started calling us the 'guitar army' and all this stuff.
I'm writing this down, because it is going to be hard for me to say it. Because this is probably our last time just us. See, I can write that down, but I don't think I can say it. I'm not doing this to say goodbye, though I know that has to be part of it. I'm doing it to thank you for all we have had and done and been for one another, to say I love you for making this life of mine what it is. Leaving you is the hardest thing I have to do. But the thing is, the best parts of me are in you, all three of you. You are who I am, and what I cherish in myself stays on in you.
I'd like to be able to get more girls to play guitar. I think with a girl playing electric guitar, sometimes it's seen a bit like a guy doing ballet. All the people I learned guitar from have been guys. There are some great female players, like Bonnie Raitt and Jennifer Batten, but very few.
I'm usually the last to see my influence in other people's work. People give me stuff and say "Oh look, this guy's ripping you off," and I'm like "What do you mean?" Often I see the people that I've ripped off filtered into my own work. In other people's work, I can only see specific, tiny little instances of inflections stolen from another artist.
What we're doing now, is to try to eradicate the limited notion of how people are interacting with each other through hyper-racialized ideas. A lot of it deal with, as an example, genre. If I ask you to visualize a trap musician or a hip-hop musician, you'll see one thing. If I say visualize a western classical musician, you'll see a very different thing. A lot of how music is disseminated to us is hyper-racialized. It's not something that we think about all the time, but if you take a minute to look back, it's why you get this argument when there's a white rapper.
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