Once I was checking to hotel and a couple saw my ring with Blues on it. They said 'You play blues. That music is so sad.' I gave them tickets to the show and they came up afterwards and said 'You didn't play one sad song.'

I don't wanta do any Blues or any sad songs.

The delta blues is a low-down dirty shame blues. It's a sad big wide sound something to make you think about people who are dead or the women who left you.

I have as much input to the blues I just never got the chance the opportunity or maybe the respect.

To me the blues is an infection. I don't think it's necessarily a melancholy thing the blues can be really positive and I think I think anyone and everyone can have a place for the blues. It need not always a woeful sorrowful thing. It's more reflective it reminds you to feel.

I know some people will be surprised to hear it but I've found that my music whether its blues or rock or whatever you want to call it can be channeled into a positive direction that actually helps people.

I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll.

When all the original blues guys are gone you start to realize that someone has to tend to the tradition. I recognize that I have some responsibility to keep the music alive and it's a pretty honorable position to be in.

What makes my approach special is that I do different things. I do jazz blues country music and so forth. I do them all like a good utility man.

It was stumbling on to really the bible of the blues you know and a very powerful drug to be introduced to us and I absorbed it totally and it changed my complete outlook on music.

Pop music is aspirin and the blues are vitamins.

I find Indian music very funky. I mean it's very soulful with their own kind of blues. But it's the only other school on the planet that develops improvisation to the high degree that you find in jazz music. So we have a lot of common ground.

Maybe someday you can accuse somebody of being a poseur by selling out and playing blues music but that's just not going to happen in my lifetime.

I love country music blues and punk and one day I might make those kinds of records.

I dabbled in things like Howlin' Wolf Cream and Led Zeppelin but when I heard Son House and Robert Johnson it blew my mind. It was something I'd been missing my whole life. That music made me discard everything else and just get down to the soul and honesty of the blues.

Some of the greatest blues music is some of the darkest music you've ever heard.

Since I was a kid I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties Chicago blues of the Fifties West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.