My dad is a huge rock and roll lead guitar fan. I didn't even really know that until recently. Everything has to have a guitar solo in it.

Experiencing yourself out of context, divorced from your usual point of view, skews your perspective – it’s like hearing your voice on an answering machine. It’s almost like meeting a stranger; or discovering a talent you never knew you had.

I love classical music. It has left a major mark on my playing.

I love playing music as much as if not more so than I did when I was 19; that compared to most of my peers is pretty surprising. I wake up every day and get really excited about doing stuff that I have been doing for the last 30 years. I just love it.

The era itself has nothing to do with anything. We weren't really attached to that at all. I just saw this thing where they had a Poison concert on VH1, and to me, that is being attached to an era.

I mean, the thing about Guns N' Roses was that it wasn't trying to attach itself to the '80s, or anything that had to do with the '80s. It's just who we were at that time. We were doing what we wanted to do. That had really nothing to do with anything around us, except for the simple fact that we were rebelling against that stuff.

Notes and chords have become my second language and, more often than not, that vocabulary expresses what I feel when language fails me.