Riffs Quotations

I'm always working on new songs. With the technology these days, any idiot can record on Pro Tools on your laptop. All you have to do is plug a microphone into the input jack and anybody can have their own recording studio. So I'm always down in my basement, singing along to riffs or whoever I'm collaborating with.

Some of the best rock riffs ever written were by Jimmy Page, and I can't really name the songs, but some of the stuff he did on his first and second records is beyond brilliant.

I think Pantera is a type of band that has been documented very, very well over the years. With the past re-releases, we were fortunate enough to have old demos and stuff that never really saw the light of day. But Pantera was not the type of band to waste many riffs or many parts or songs.

There's such a huge difference between a great arrangement of riffs and a song. Sometimes the two can be the same. But the difference is a song doesn't necessarily need a riff, whereas a riff doesn't necessarily mean you've got a good song on your hands.

I wrote all these heavy, tuned-down guitar riffs and I asked him if he wanted to play the guitar solo on it, and he was pumped to do it, ... That was the first time I appeared on a record with Dime, and now this. I just wish this wasn't the way it had to happen.

I wrote all my songs on my main instruments, and the songs I would record in my bedroom were just acoustic guitar, mandolin, and sometimes bass. I really like the texture the mandolin added to my music, but my fingers were too big to play it... I could only do little riffs and whatever.

Probably. When we got together and started throwing around the ideas, I just started bringing out some old riffs I used to play. 'Guarded' and 'Decadence' are pretty much straight-up, aggressive tracks on the album. Those were the first two ideas I had come up with. That set the tone right off the bat of it being a little bit more aggressive at times. Out of 19 songs that we tracked 14 going on the album that's a lot of material. We try to give every song its own identity. We don't want to fall in the rut of being a repetitious-sounding band. We don't want every song to sound like 'Down with the Sickness' or 'Prayer' . It's got to be a creative mood. It's got to be its own thing.

The way that we imitate each others' riffs is something that other bands don't do as much. If we're jamming with a jazz band, or I am jamming with a jazz band, I have to catch myself, the tendency is always to do that.

It's all acoustic. The electric sounding riffs I played on an acoustic, ... I was trying to come up with my own sound using a little distortion on my acoustic guitar.

For me, August Wilson is the person who made it appear that I had a place in the American theater. For the first time, I felt I actually saw characters that I knew, that spoke my language and had my stories and could express them in the riffs of blues and jazz.