Brian Setzer Quotations

If you listen to everybody's opinions, I mean, I always say I'd be digging a ditch on the side of the road now if I had listened to what everybody told me what to do. You know, you have to follow your heart, you have to.

I always thought when I hit 50 years old that'd be it for the travel. I don't have to tell you - you wait at an airport, your flight's delayed, get on a 14-hour flight, get off, get stuck in traffic, you get to the hotel and the room service is closed.

I wanted to go back to Sun. Unfortunately, most of the gear is gone from Sun. The way I take it now, it's almost like a tourist destination. So, it would have been pretty difficult to have brought all the gear into Sun to make it like it was in the '50's.

Robert Plant is one of the nicest people you'll ever meet, never mind rock star. He's so down to earth.

To me, rockabilly music paralleled punk's energy and feeling, but the players were much better.

With the Stray Cats at least, we really took the music somewhere else. First, we wrote our own songs. That's a real weak point in modern classics if you do rockabilly or blues.

I started a big band when grunge was popular. I mean, that didn't make much sense.

A lot of people put all that stuff on a pedestal, and they won't touch it. But I don't think that's the reason they did that. I think they played that stuff out of pure joy.

It is hard to play Blue Suede Shoes. I know everyone has heard it 10 million times, and that makes it even harder to play it, but there's a very laid back tempo on that. I was surprised at how slow it really was.

For every rockabilly festival staged here, there are 10 held overseas.

I'm not God's gift to rockabilly. There's great players out there, and some of them deserve a lot more than they've gotten.

Veteran performers are dying off, and new acts simply aren't emerging on the national scene.

I can't tell you how many people have asked me to show them Stray Cat Strut and that little diminished run on the C. I guess my brain is wired backwards. I don't know what possessed me to do that, but I did.

I didn't want to take the guitar solos down note-for-note, but more or less use them as a map, and keep all the hooks from the guitar playing, and let myself come through.

Since the big band started I'm just always swamped with movies and things. It certainly pays the bills and it's very satisfying, because I get to write all these big charts and all this crazy music.

Normally, you go into the recording studio, make a record and then take it on the road and you think... wow... I could have done THIS to it, or something.

Rock and roll and swing never quite mixed. Rock and roll came in and just blew everything out of the water. Big bands were dead.

Elvis is not so difficult as Johnny Cash because his voice is so distinctive. If you try to copy Johnny Cash, it's just going to sound dumb.

The jazz chord substitutions in a country song... that was another thing that bent people's ears. I guess that my favorites are the unique ones. It's not how fast you play. It's that unique blending of different stuff I'm most proud of.

The biggest challenge for me was Get Rhythm. I don't know why.

The songwriting has never really stepped forward from the '50's.

To keep creating something with this type of music, you have to take it out of the box.

It's not about how loud you turn the amp up. That's not what makes it sound big. What makes it sound big is fooling around with different delays and reverb settings.

Mark Winchester has left the band. He's decided that he's tired of the road and just wants to concentrate on his career in Nashville. I don't blame him at all. He'll certainly be missed.

Don't be afraid to take liberties with this music. Try and put some of yourself into it.

I love Glen Campbell. He never gets a mention.

I put a metronome up to all the songs, and I tried to really keep it true to the original tempos.

Just because you put super great musicians together, it doesn't mean you're going to have that chemistry as a band.

People out there maybe know who Junior Parker is and some of those Sun Records blues guys.

I basically sat down for a month, with all the Sun stuff I could find and just picked out my favorites. I didn't think that they were indicative of '54 to '57, although I tried to stay within that period.

We weren't afraid to mix some crazy styles into the standard rockabilly look. We also took a lot of different musical influences that were part of that era.

When I was a kid, I found out about Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent through the Beatles and the Stones doing covers of rockabilly songs,

You had to pick something like Blue Suede Shoes because it's the flagship of the Sun label, but then I wanted to dig down and find something like Rakin' and Scrapin'.

Elvis Presleys' first album had more energy and more enthusiam than any other album at the time - when it was released it just blew everything else out. It changed the whole landscape of music

I don't think there is a musician today that hasn't been affected by Elvis' music. His definitive years - 1954-57 - can only be described as rock's cornerstone. He was the original cool.

Rock & Roll is the physical thing that just comes out of you .. the other stuff you have to sit down and learn .. once you learn scales and chord progressions, you can make up your own versions

,,, all around it would have to be Eddie Cochran, because it wasn't just music with him; it was his guitar playing, his look, his singing, I'd say that, all things considered, he's probably my favorite "cat" of all time

... so much of what we do now started in 1954 at Sun Records in Memphis Tennessee ... those guys were inventing that stuff (Rock & Roll) ... you can really tell on some tracks ... they were actually afraid at times of what they were playing. But Rock & Roll definitely didn't come before that time; it started right there

I got cat class and I got cat style

My D'Angelico is a jazz archtop guitar. That guitar was made for Glenn Miller's guitar player in 1939. It's a '39 D'Angelico New Yorker.

I thought it would be cool to take flat-picking and put it in overdrive. I thought it would bend the ear.

It's really funny, I think to myself... I've got my same guitar and amp, it's just a bigger room now! Some things don't change.

I mean, what 16-year-old is going to listen to Doc Watson?

As a genre, rockabilly's post-Elvis profile has seldom been lower in the United States. Many labels that produced fresh bass-slappin' sides during the '90's are now out of business.

McCartney! Haven't met him and haven't played with him. I would LOVE to. He needs to make a kick-ass rockabilly record.

There's a fine line between pleasure and pain. Love me like a ball and chain.

My friend sent me the song, which I hadn't heard before, ... It faded in toward the middle, and I thought the computer file was broken. But we did research and found out that a tape fragment is all that exists of the song.

He was just thrilled, ... He said, 'Oh my gosh, you want to record that old song? I think I got it up in the attic!'

Rockabilly is really part of our background, ... It's a cousin to the blues and country. And it's that important.

Those drum parts were so integral to that original rockabilly. People don't play that anymore. A lot of those original drum fills were kept.

I wanted to keep it authentic, ... I even went as far as copying the original drum parts. I felt that was an overlooked part of those recordings. Now when people play rockabilly they ignore the little fills and tricks they used.

The inspiration for this was my son, who's 18, ... I was playing some old Sun Records, and he and his friends rushed into the room and loved it. I thought that if I did a Sun tribute record I could get more young people to listen to it.

I never really did rockabilly exactly like they did it in the '50s, ... We always kind of updated it. But I didn't need to go blasting crazy, wild guitar solos around this stuff. I tried to keep it authentic.

He said it was too long ago for him to put himself back in that mind-set,