I liked a lot of the things other people liked - Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, Van Halen, AC/DC - but if I compared it to my dad's music, there just seemed to be elements missing.

If you only ever heard "Valley Girl," or "Don't Eat The Yellow Snow," or a song that has a comedic narrative, you would get some impression that that was novelty music, but that's the only stuff that ever got on the radio. You can make the argument that that's what has confused generations as to what his music's about.

Well, Steve Vai joined my dad's band right around the time when I actually started playing guitar. So he gave me a couple of lessons on fundamentals, and gave me some scales and practice things to work on. But I pretty much learned everything by ear.

There's no difference in a lot of people's minds between good musicians and popular musicians.

If there's some work to be done that seems like it will be fun, I'll do it. I don't take anything seriously at all.

Just because something has tubes doesn't mean it's the best. I mean, tubes are obviously good, but the circuit of this thing is designed well and it sounds good.

For me, the most difficult thing is that I am learning melodies on guitar from some songs whose melodies were not meant to be played on guitar. Ever. They were intended mostly for keyboards or melodic percussion.