Some artists can work under one guise, whether it's a name or a band or doing film soundtracks, put all of their ideas in one pot and move on. Me, I need to compartmentalize.
The acting served as an outlet for my emotions for some time because I was doing it under the guise of someone else. And that can only be therapeutic up to a point until you truly deal with it and can express it to someone directly. Acting was a helpful outlet for me as a child. In some ways, I can say it saved my life.
I play a little guitar, write a few tunes, make a few movies, but none of that's really me. The real me is something else.
When I was about 9, my brother, who's six years older than me, started getting guitar lessons, and I wouldn't say that it inspired me to pick up an instrument: it was more me being like, 'Well, if he's getting guitar lessons, then so am I. I'm not missing out,' type of thing.
When I was a kid, my parents gave me piano lessons and guitar lessons for a while, but I was never very good at it. I have big, sort of awkward hands. It's hard to keep going when you don't get any better.
I gave guitar lessons. I tried to join bands. My mom always said it was obvious that nothing was going to stop me.
My mom was always driving me back and forth to guitar lessons, growing up. She was super supportive and probably my biggest cheerleader.
The ukulele was the first of many instruments they had bought for me. They got me a guitar when I was eleven, which my son Morgan uses until this day. They paid for 3 years of guitar lessons; they bought me a bass fiddle, which I still play.
I started playing guitar when I was eight. Well, I started piano and really liked it but never practiced, but it taught me how to read music, and then my mom signed me up for guitar lessons, and I connected to that way more.
My mother was a very beautiful lady, I thought. She was very good to me. I guess - she died when I was nine and a half, but if she had lived, I probably wouldn't be trying to play guitar. She wanted me to be known, but as something else. Not a guitar player.
And this whole period of time of gradually working at being a better guitar player and songwriter have gradually led me to the point where I feel I'm doing a clearer representation of the thing that I've been feeling inside me since I was four years old.
As a guitar player, it's harder for me to impress somebody than it is to write a song that they like.
When I was in high school, there were these British blues-rock-type bands with really good guitar players that would jam on one song for half an hour. And as much as I was amazed by some of those guitar players, seeing them prompted me to make a note that that's not something I could do.
I'd much rather talk about guitar playing. I hate it when people ask me about my lyrics. I always feel like telling them to just go and read them.
Let me explain something about guitar playing. Everyone's got their own character, and that's the thing that's amazed me about guitar playing since the day I first picked it up. Everyone's approach to what can come out of six strings is different from another person, but it's all valid.
For me, songwriting is really where it's at. I turn to use the guitar just to help me write the songs. That's it. As a result, my guitar playing suffers pretty horribly.
Guitar playing is both extremely easy for me and extremely difficult for me at the same time.
Guitar solos, to me, should be a really articulate way to make fun of guitar solos.
It really shocked me just to hear of the fans' response to 'St. Anger' not having guitar solos.
It's quite similar to guitar solos, only with programming you have to use your brain. The most important thing is that it should have some emotional effect on me, rather than just, 'Oh, that's really clever.'
