You absorb so much from whatever your environment is, as an artist, and you learn to take from it what can help you create.

Music can always be a life-changing experience, for musicians and fans, or at least life-affecting, but it depends on to what degree.

I will still carry on changing all the time.

If I ever really felt depressed, I would just start putting on all my old records that I played as a kid, because the whole thing that really lifted me then still lifted me during those other times. It was good medicine for me, and it still does that for me when I put something on. Isn't it wonderful that we've got all that good medicine? I think it's got to be all part of our DNA, this mass communication through music. That's what it is. It's got to be, hasn't it? Music is the one thing that has been consistently there for me. It hasn't let me down.

The blues appealed to me, but so did rock. The early rockabilly guitarists like Cliff Gallup and Scotty Moore were just as important to me as the blues guitarists.

My finger picking is sort of a cross between Pete Seeger, Earl Scruggs, and total incompetence.

The guitar to me, from the classical/gut-string guitar right through to Hendrix, et cetera, has all the range [of sound]. Within those six strings it is incredible what one can get sound-wise. It's just down to imagination, really.