I love good rock'n'roll, blues and jazz, gospel, and a little reggae.
If they played more blues, people would just get it - they try to hold it back but just about can't hold it back now because the blues is really going.
I got to see all these incredible blues players, like Jimmy Reed.
I'm an old soul. The blues, especially older blues, is the human element that kind of gives the music soul, and I think that maybe not enough people connect to the blues. It's a very powerful place to be; and if you can express that to an audience, I think that you can express a lot through that.
I once wrote a short story called 'The Best Blues Singer in the World,' and it went like this: 'The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.' End of story. That says it all. Nothing else to say. I've been rewriting that same story over and over again. All my plays are rewriting that same story.
I'm not a big blues fan, but I don't know anyone who doesn't dig B.B. King.
My father was always playing this ethnic blues stuff around the house, and both my parents played. Then one day my father brought home Big Bill Broonzy, and there he was sitting in our living room playing, and blues was in my heart from the time I was 12 years old.
Once you start collecting records you learn more and more about jazz and blues.
See, that's nothing but blues, that's all I'm singing about. It's today's blues.
When you sit down and think about what rock 'n' roll music really is, then you have to change that question. Played up-tempo, you call it rock 'n' roll; at a regular tempo, you call it rhythm and blues.
Yeah; I'm a much better blues player than anybody knows, but being in the kind of group I'm in, we were always trying to make popular records.
Logically, when you talkin' about folk music and blues, you find out it's music of just plain people.
From the first album, Led Zeppelin was always going to be a totally new approach from what had gone before - whether it was approaching the blues or folk music like 'Babe I'm Gonna Leave You': nothing existed like that.
I guess music, particularly the blues, is the only form of schizophrenia that has organised itself into being both legal and beneficial to society.
When I got out of high school, I joined a local blues band in Philadelphia - Woody's Truck Stop.
The reflection of the world is blues, that's where that part of the music is at. Then you got this other kind of music that's tryin' to come around.
We were either listening to jazz or Robert Johnson, the old blues man, but not to our peers.
I didn't want to go out and change anything. I just wanted to make the music that was part of my background, which was rock and blues and hip-hop.
I don't want to be in some big beautiful place that nobody want me, because I play the blues.
I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.
The British ballads became a new kind of form in their hand. And out of them came the blues, a new kind of song of commentary and satire, a song form which, after all, has become the main musical form of the whole human species.
The first real thing I heard was Three O'Clock Blues by B.B. King. That's where it all began for me.
Maybe someday you can accuse somebody of being a poseur by selling out and playing blues music, but that's just not going to happen in my lifetime.
After 'The Blues Brothers,' I wanted to do a good musical number with real dancers and shoot it correctly.
'Soulfire' is a collection of stuff I've done in the past. Each song is an element of who I am: There's a doo-wop song on the album; a blues song, R&B and some jazz. For people who are going to be hearing me for the first time, it's an introduction to who I am.
The musicians that didn't know music could play the best blues. I know that I don't want no musicians who know all about music playin' for me.
I stream this radio station, Radio Nova, that's based in Paris. They curate a beautiful set that's really all over the place - they'll play blues or some West African music, then A Tribe Called Quest, then funk from Ethiopia, then James Brown, and then the Beatles. It's an amazing mix.
Sure, I get the blues. But what I try to do, is apply joy to the blues, you know? I don't know if it's a technique, or just being bent that way, being raised by the folks I was raised by.
There were a whole lot, I bought every blues record I could find, it wasn't just one or two people. My vocal influences were Ray Charles and Bobby Blue Bland.
I'm done with industrial. Seriously, my iPod collection at home has no industrial music on it; it's strictly jazz, blues and country.
Life is relationships and what we're trying to do together. And please, that's what people have been singing about forever. That's what the blues is all about - the good, the bad, the fun, all of it - that lies there in between a man and a woman.
I used to listen to the radio, and when I was about 18 years old, B.B. King was a disc jockey and he had a radio program, 15 minutes a day, over in West Memphis, Arkansas, and he would play the blues.
We played one warm-up gig at this bar that was kinda like that bar in 'The Blues Brothers' with the chicken wire. This place called The Brick House, in Housatonic. I really can't believe we're going to play for people in New York City. I'm terrified, but it's a small enough room. But it's really just supposed to be for the fun of it.
I did a lot of 'NYPD Blues' and 'Law & Orders' and a couple of other ones that were shot in New York earlier in my career.
The basis of everything that I plugged into when I was younger was blues, and it always stayed with me.
I have to have music playing constantly. It creates the tone and mood for anything you are doing. I specifically love rock, and Jimi Hendrix is one of my favorite artists. My favorite song is 'Red House,' because it's heavy on the blues.
