The Guess Who Quotes
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It's like a runner or a swimmer training all the time. I sing every day.
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There may be a new album, and there may not. Right now, we're encouraging bootlegging because there have been some great live things that ended up on the Internet. Rather than try to stop it, we like it. If nobody gave a crap about you, they wouldn't bother to bootleg you.
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You could live in Winnipeg a thousand years and not meet Ringo, Paul McCartney, or Bob Dylan.
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Change is inevitable, and you can't stop that change. You say, 'Wait, stop,' and it just drives right over you.
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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.
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It's nice to get any awards, whether it's lifetime achievement or the Keith Richards award for being alive one more year.
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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.
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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.
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The biggest compliment I get is that I don't sound like anybody else. I think I value that as the highest compliment.
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When you get successful, you can do pretty much whatever you want.
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I can put up a blog in 10 seconds.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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As a member of Guess Who, I think 'No Time' was the best thing we ever did. It was a pivotal song in our career.
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I started playing the violin when I was 5, but by the time I was 12 or 13, I wasn't really liking it.
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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.
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I learned at an early age that I was given something special when I was born, and that was the gift of music.
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I certainly haven't lived the life of a Buddhist monk.