Don't be afraid to take liberties with this music. Try and put some of yourself into it.

McCartney! Haven't met him and haven't played with him. I would LOVE to. He needs to make a kick-ass rockabilly record.

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.

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.

To keep creating something with this type of music, you have to take it out of the box.

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.

To me, rockabilly music paralleled punk's energy and feeling, but the players were much better.