I can play guitar - but I can't really. I wouldn't say I'm talented at it. I just kind of watch videos on YouTube, and I follow the instructions... OK, yeah, my hidden talent: I'm good at following instructions!
'Something/Anything?' was kind of a different record, since I'm playing everything myself. A lot of the songs on there have a particular kind of instrumentation that is much like a guitar quartet, and in some ways, it's an exceptional song on that record because so much of the writing on 'Something/Anything?' is piano-oriented.
Until I was around 12 or 13, I only listened to classical music, mostly Tchaikovsky. But around that age, I started listening to Iron Maiden, and that's when I purchased my first guitar, a pearl-white Westone.
I feel like the guitar playing gives me rhythm with my punches - really helps to change up my jab.
I love to sing - whenever I am not on set, I am usually in my room jamming out with my guitar.
Music was a part of my life even before acting happened. But I mostly play my guitar only for myself and sometimes when jamming with my friends.
I grew up playing guitar in the late Nineties, early 2000s, so a very acoustic-driven pop-rock era, and then in college, I started listening to Jason Isbell and Kacey Musgraves. Then I really fell in love when I discovered really old country, like June Carter Cash - one of my all-time favorites.
I grew up playing the saxophone. I joined the jazz band in high school, but somewhere along the way I realized the guys who strummed acoustic guitars at parties were the ones who got the attention. So I asked a friend to show me a few chords, and when I moved to L.A. I spent a lot of time practicing my guitar.
I went through a period in my life where I didn't have money to buy ramen noodles and peanut butter and jelly, but I also needed to go to the guitar store and buy strings and picks and polish and rags. I couldn't live with myself if I didn't play guitar.
Where I grew up, I could be a punk rocker and a jock. But in college, it became apparent that those two worlds didn't mix. When I brought my guitar back to school after Thanksgiving break, a friend handed me his bass and said, 'Listen to the Ramones.'
I just want to play like Jimi Hendrix. I love other forms of music and wish I could play classical piano, or saxophone like John Coltrane, but that will never happen. Because my nature is to play electric guitar really well and to emulate my heroes from the late 1960s.
I don't know any guitar player, any of the real greats, who don't rate Joni Mitchell up there with the best of them.
If something I do now sounds like something I did in the past, it's because I played it. I can't help sounding like myself. That's going to happen. The things that I play on guitar that resonate with me are probably the same things that resonated with me when I started playing in Joy Division.
As a kid, I was into music, played guitar in a band. Then I started acting in plays in junior high school and just got lost in the puzzle of acting, the magic of it. I think it was an escape for me.
I knew Rocky George, the guitar player, 'cause I went to junior high school with him, so I've known him for many years.
There are some beautiful things about people like Katy Perry, who are bold enough to go up on a pink cotton-candy cloud, with a guitar, in a tutu, and sing all by herself.
The first guitar I ever owned was a Kay SG copy. That cost like $35. Man, that was a terrible guitar.
My hobbies are playing piano and guitar, pining for girls, worrying about climate change, pining for girls, and the poetry of John Keats.
The first song I learned on the guitar was a Kenny Chesney song called 'What I Need to Do'; it was just an easy song to play... and it was really cool to see that come full-circle a few years later and have him record a song that I was part of.
That it's a lot harder to make a keyboard sound not-cheesy than a guitar.
