Change is inevitable, and you can't stop that change. You say, 'Wait, stop,' and it just drives right over you.
— Randy Bachman
I don't like the word 'rock star' or 'super star.' I am a guitar player, a songwriter who got lucky because I stayed at it and didn't give up, long enough that people noticed me.
I learnt one thing in the past or in my life: the only person you can change is yourself, and it has to come from within.
I have chosen to keep my personal life separate from my music, as the two are exclusive from each other, and I want to remain that way. I'll talk music, production, writing songs, touring with anyone but keep religion, politics and world affairs off the table, as my expertise is in songs and music.
You don't have to have a great voice to sing, just a distinctive one. But make sure you say the words clearly and tell a story.
Burton Cummings joining the Guess Who in January 1966 changed my life forever. It's been a rocky affiliation, no doubt. One journalist once described our relationship as the longest running soap opera in Canadian history. That may be a bit oversimplified.
I started playing the violin when I was 5, but by the time I was 12 or 13, I wasn't really liking it.
Generally, you are held to a sound and that becomes your sound. That gets branded as your sound, and all the copycats start with it because the labels are looking for that sound.
I listened to it last night for the first time since we started this project. I went out to my car and put it in and went to an empty parking lot and just listened and read the little pamphlet that came with it. After two or three songs I burst into tears.
My love, growing up on the Prairies, was country music.
Those two songs condense the two albums. They also show what the audiences wanted. I was desperate to keep the band together and find something that the public would like.
When you get successful, you can do pretty much whatever you want.
You are still lucky - you have a certain type of people who keep buying your music - but then you can get typecast and have to keep making that same music, and you can change only slightly. It's risky to bounce around and change your type of music.
It's nice to get any awards, whether it's lifetime achievement or the Keith Richards award for being alive one more year.
I remember having my father stand over me when I had driven over my own foot; one leg was out of the car and one leg was in the car. He looked at me and told me that I was a drunk and that he was ashamed to call me his son. That night, I stopped drinking and I never drank again; I was twenty four.
The guitar is such an incredible instrument; it plays classical, flamenco, jazz, country, bluegrass, rock, acid, blues. You'll never see a clarinet playing Black Sabbath. But you will see a guitar in a clarinet band playing rhythm. It is the most popular instrument in the world; it is the one everybody loves.
People have made a living deconstructing Lennon and The Beatles songs because of their compositional sophistication. But what's so exciting about John is that he never had any of that training on musical theory; something just spoke to him, and he just knew what sounded right.
There is a great book out called 'Everything I Needed to Learn I Learned in Kindergarten,' and I believe that everything I ever needed to learn on guitar was in my first two years of hungry learning: Scotty Moore, Hank Marvin, Chet Atkins, Lenny Breau, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.
I look on most religions as fear-based rather than love-based. I've drifted away from all that. Yes, I think I'm more spiritual. I just don't go and pretend every Saturday or Sunday that I'm in this wonderful club. I'm exploring.
I never get tired of performing to people who want to hear me. Hell, that's my handshake to the world. I'm doing just what I've wanted to do since that day I was 15 and heard Lenny Breau play the guitar.
I don't think that bands that make it on their first album are as strong as bands that don't: there is nowhere to go but down.
The fact that the internet is so active; people can now speak to me indirectly.
My songs are like cheap Neil Young copies.
To add an AC outlet, for example, you just drill a circular hole in the wall, tap into the wiring, add the outlet and you're set. If you don't want it, pull it out and plaster over it with more earth to seal the hole.
When you play all that as a body of work there are four great songs, four mediocre songs and four bad songs. I didn't know it at the time; I was just doing my best.
You don't need a uniform color: We used a mixture of brick red, browns and grays, and then threw in seashells, branches and various types of rock, so our walls ended up looking like cave paintings!
Radio was my lifeline as a kid growing up in Winnipeg in the 1950s. It connected me with the wider world outside our little prairie city.
I think if you're a painter, you paint; if you're a golfer, you golf; if you're a fisherman, you fish; if you're a musician, you play music.
When I pull into a city and I rent a car and it's Nashville, or it's London, or I'm driving in the taxi to the hotel, and on comes one of my songs, it's like, 'Oh my God, they're still playing these songs on the radio.' And you still feel tearful and very grateful that somebody still likes these songs that you made up.
I think what made John Lennon so exciting as an artist is that, like Dylan and other musicians with a truly important musical legacy, he had several faces, personas that changed over time as he developed.
When one knows at an early age that their gift, talent and direction is musical, one tends to focus on that and let nothing interfere or impede the forward motion toward the end of that rainbow. And after 50-something years of rockin' out, you still realise there is no end to that distant rainbow until one's last sunset.
My life has been a whole series of accidents, some of them happy, some not.
Every night we all felt grateful to be there, stunned at the amount of people that are there, and stunned at their reactions. They go crazy; they know every lyric from eight years of age to eighty. It's unbelievable.
I learned at an early age that I was given something special when I was born, and that was the gift of music.
The local music community here was dying for a place to record, so we started doing acoustic, folk and bluegrass and then did rock projects for other bands, as well as for my son Tal and my own work.
Those albums are so important to me because, for the first time, I was making my own music, paying for it, finding strengths in it, and going through the process of finding the right music for the record.
When I was five I had violin lessons.
With The Guess Who, it took us fifty-something singles before we had hits.
You take all the things that frighten you, and when you can get them to work for you all of sudden people are calling you a success.
