That's the thing about great artists: They find the thing that's most obvious to themselves, what's most conscious and natural, and they put it out there and the audience comes.

Most of my records are very dense, composition-heavy, and there's bits of different kinds of music like an acoustic ballad, instrumental trio pieces, and vocal tracks.

I was a kid, 12 or something, when the Partridge Family was big on TV. I liked the curly cord running from the bass to the amps, which were real fancy. That cord looked so cool. I said, 'Wow! I gotta play something like that!'

I didn't have any aspirations of becoming famous or successful; in fact I was scared to death of all that. I remember somebody once said that if a rock musician goes on tour, he goes insane. I was very impressionable and I carried this useless weight of fear around with me about going on tour, all because of this thing somebody said.

I'm a big fan of cultural music, and that's how I try to expand my playing, by listening to music that is not conventionally American.

I've never really heard anybody imitating anything of mine the way they do with Edward Van Halen's stuff.

If you want to play something that you hear, you need to listen with your mind's eye. You've heard of the mind's eye, right? Your mind has an ear too. It's a kind of listening, but it's not using your ears to listen. It's listening with your inner ear, and that's what you want to translate onto the guitar.