When you're a guitar teacher, you teach people for a few years, and you become comrades after a while. Because everybody eventually catches up to everybody else, and you want to help each other out - to see if you can make the dream a reality.

Song ideas have come to me in the middle of interviews, in the shower, or while I'm writing another song.

I'm ready to take the heat.

I see something in her eyes, sends me to a better place.

18th September, 1970; Jimi Hendrix dies. I'm still on the football team when I get the news. So I take my helmet off and confront the coach to tell him I'm quitting the team. In a moment of brilliance he gives me one look and says "OK".

Basic anatomy. That has got to be the ongoing frustration: Why can't my fingers do what I want them to do? Not being able to play what I hear in my head - that is the ultimate source of frustration.

I assume most guitar players are like me. They're playing, having fun; then they get a magazine in the mail that says "Shred Is Dead" and they say, "What the Hell?" They throw it away and keep on playing.