Every song is like a kid. How can you have that many kids and have a favorite? Which one do I like to hang most with?

I never took guitar lessons. I took classical piano lessons from the age of six when we lived in Holland.

On 'Van Halen,' I was a young punk, and everything revolved around the fastest kid in town, gunslinger attitude. But I'd say that at the time of 'Fair Warning,' I started concentrating more on songwriting. But I guess in most people's minds I'm just a gunslinger.

I started doing all kinds of weird stuff on the guitar, which became part of my playing. I started doing harmonics and tapping on the guitar and pulling off strings and doing all this weird stuff that no one had ever done before.

We're musicians. We make music for a living. It's that simple. Nothing else matters.

You only have 12 notes. Do what you want with them.

David Lee Roth had the idea that if you covered a successful song, you were half way home. C'mon - Van Halen doing 'Dancing in the Streets'? It was stupid. I started feeling like I would rather bomb playing my own songs than be successful playing someone else's music.