Allan Holdsworth Quotes

When I listen to and play the songs from 'Narrow Stairs' now, that record feels like a record where we had established a style that arguably was more our own than it was in the beginning. Going into that record, I felt a lot more confident in my songwriting. It was a fairly prolific time for me.

When I first started making music, I wrote the lyrics first, but now, because the music has got kind of wilder, I've flipped it.

I can't just turn over and sing disco or rock.

I started playing and writing songs when I was eight.

Songwriting was definitely first. I started singing, and then I was rapping; then I went back to singing. As I was growing up, I just taught myself piano and guitar.

First, I started to play the organ. I did that until I was 11. From the age of 11 to 13, I gave up music entirely. And then at 13, I picked up the guitar, and after one and a half years, I started practicing intensively. I began playing in rock bands, and it was there that I discovered that the music I liked to write was always instrumental.

I kept playing blues-based music all during the 1980s, and it was tough.

I don't really play a lot of slide in general, but it was fun getting into that style and exploring it.

We'll see some simplistic players for a while, who'll then get into more complicated things and evolve with their instruments. This is a cycle that happens over and over again in music.

It's amazing to me to see how bands evolve and how they take all their influences and come up with their own sound.

I got my first set of drums when I was around 3. I went from band to marching band to Latin jazz band - it's like riding a bike.

It's probably a combination of personal and non-personal matters that have led us to where we are musically.

Now, when we first started, I would be playing something good and then feel like I wasn't doing the right thing and launch into some idiotic cliche. Luckily for me, Bobby was patient.

I'm trying to change the root of funk, trying to make it more progressive, more melodic and more lyrically structured.

Music became my focus. At 13, I was jamming with my mates. At 15, I was playing clubs.

The Pleasure Seekers eventually turned into Cradle, when we started writing our own material. My younger sister Nancy was brought in as singer and I kind of stepped aside as main lead singer and concentrated on my instrument.

I played for anybody and everybody from the time I started playing guitar, when I was 10 or 11.

There's 40 or 50 songs that nobody's heard that I've done in between albums. There's a whole evolution from Midnite Vultures to Sea Change that's never been released.

The reflection of the world is blues, that's where that part of the music is at. Then you got this other kind of music that's tryin' to come around.

I have been accused of being a very simplistic, very lyrical player, and that's okay. That just comes from the blues, which is my background. But every day you wake up and transcend. You can't ever rest on your laurels.

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

I played the cello from when I was ten, and then I bought a guitar from the father of some friends of mine and played that for a while. And then when I was fourteen or so, I bought a guitar - a real nice one - in Durham, North Carolina, that I worked with up until I was about twenty-five.

Music was something I found on my own. I got my first guitar when I was around 10, and it just all developed over time.

I feel like bands should be growing, living, functioning entities and to crystallize a band into a single album, and for that to be a touchstone - I understand it from a fan's perspective but I also feel like it's a little bit misleading in terms of the way bands actually function.

I've always made music - pretty much since I was born.