Brian Setzer Quotes
I put a metronome up to all the songs, and I tried to really keep it true to the original tempos.
With the Stray Cats at least, we really took the music somewhere else. First, we wrote our own songs. That's a real weak point in modern classics if you do rockabilly or blues.
It's not about how loud you turn the amp up. That's not what makes it sound big. What makes it sound big is fooling around with different delays and reverb settings.
Normally, you go into the recording studio, make a record and then take it on the road and you think... wow... I could have done THIS to it, or something.
I'm not God's gift to rockabilly. There's great players out there, and some of them deserve a lot more than they've gotten.
Mark Winchester has left the band. He's decided that he's tired of the road and just wants to concentrate on his career in Nashville. I don't blame him at all. He'll certainly be missed.
To me, rockabilly music paralleled punk's energy and feeling, but the players were much better.
Veteran performers are dying off, and new acts simply aren't emerging on the national scene.
I didn't want to take the guitar solos down note-for-note, but more or less use them as a map, and keep all the hooks from the guitar playing, and let myself come through.
You had to pick something like Blue Suede Shoes because it's the flagship of the Sun label, but then I wanted to dig down and find something like Rakin' and Scrapin'.
People out there maybe know who Junior Parker is and some of those Sun Records blues guys.
Elvis is not so difficult as Johnny Cash because his voice is so distinctive. If you try to copy Johnny Cash, it's just going to sound dumb.
To keep creating something with this type of music, you have to take it out of the box.
Since the big band started I'm just always swamped with movies and things. It certainly pays the bills and it's very satisfying, because I get to write all these big charts and all this crazy music.
Rock & Roll is the physical thing that just comes out of you .. the other stuff you have to sit down and learn .. once you learn scales and chord progressions, you can make up your own versions
I thought it would be cool to take flat-picking and put it in overdrive. I thought it would bend the ear.
My D'Angelico is a jazz archtop guitar. That guitar was made for Glenn Miller's guitar player in 1939. It's a '39 D'Angelico New Yorker.
Elvis Presleys' first album had more energy and more enthusiam than any other album at the time - when it was released it just blew everything else out. It changed the whole landscape of music
Don't be afraid to take liberties with this music. Try and put some of yourself into it.
It's really funny, I think to myself... I've got my same guitar and amp, it's just a bigger room now! Some things don't change.
As a genre, rockabilly's post-Elvis profile has seldom been lower in the United States. Many labels that produced fresh bass-slappin' sides during the '90's are now out of business.
I don't think there is a musician today that hasn't been affected by Elvis' music. His definitive years - 1954-57 - can only be described as rock's cornerstone. He was the original cool.
