Brian Setzer Quotes
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If you listen to everybody's opinions, I mean, I always say I'd be digging a ditch on the side of the road now if I had listened to what everybody told me what to do. You know, you have to follow your heart, you have to.
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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.
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People out there maybe know who Junior Parker is and some of those Sun Records blues guys.
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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.
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I basically sat down for a month, with all the Sun stuff I could find and just picked out my favorites. I didn't think that they were indicative of '54 to '57, although I tried to stay within that period.
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I can't tell you how many people have asked me to show them Stray Cat Strut and that little diminished run on the C. I guess my brain is wired backwards. I don't know what possessed me to do that, but I did.
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I mean, what 16-year-old is going to listen to Doc Watson?
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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.
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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.
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It is hard to play Blue Suede Shoes. I know everyone has heard it 10 million times, and that makes it even harder to play it, but there's a very laid back tempo on that. I was surprised at how slow it really was.
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I got cat class and I got cat style
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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
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I wanted to go back to Sun. Unfortunately, most of the gear is gone from Sun. The way I take it now, it's almost like a tourist destination. So, it would have been pretty difficult to have brought all the gear into Sun to make it like it was in the '50's.
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I thought it would be cool to take flat-picking and put it in overdrive. I thought it would bend the ear.
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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.
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,,, all around it would have to be Eddie Cochran, because it wasn't just music with him; it was his guitar playing, his look, his singing, I'd say that, all things considered, he's probably my favorite "cat" of all time
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For every rockabilly festival staged here, there are 10 held overseas.
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To keep creating something with this type of music, you have to take it out of the box.
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There's a fine line between pleasure and pain. Love me like a ball and chain.
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The songwriting has never really stepped forward from the '50's.
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The jazz chord substitutions in a country song... that was another thing that bent people's ears. I guess that my favorites are the unique ones. It's not how fast you play. It's that unique blending of different stuff I'm most proud of.
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I put a metronome up to all the songs, and I tried to really keep it true to the original tempos.
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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'.
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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.
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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.
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To me, rockabilly music paralleled punk's energy and feeling, but the players were much better.
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Don't be afraid to take liberties with this music. Try and put some of yourself into it.
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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.
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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.
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Veteran performers are dying off, and new acts simply aren't emerging on the national scene.
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