I was inspired to play electric guitar from listening to a lot of Carlos Santana, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and B.B. King, and that's always been the kind of music that I gravitate toward.
I pull a lot of the stuff that I play off the rhythm tracks - and Keith Richards has been one of the main contributors to my inspirational playing.
Van Halen is a work in progress.
I've always enjoyed Cheap Trick.
I'm a pretty big P.J. Harvey record fan and you can really hear New York in his record.
My dad loved Les Paul, and I wanted to be just like that.
I never try and sound like Sabbath.
'Spellbound' has a lot of guitar playing on it, obviously, but I wanted to keep it with a more straightforward beat. It doesn't have so many stops and things like that. Whereas if you listen to 'Majestic 12,' that's like a little symphony.
Great melody over great riffs is, to me, the secret of it all.
I can play rhythm guitar. I know how to hold a guitar and strum it.
You need to have spent your time from playing Top 40 pop rock in order to know how to play a song like 'Ritual,' a song like 'Absolution' or 'Idolatrine.' You need to know your classic drumming and your classic guitar.
Jimi Hendrix is one of the main influences on why I wanted to play guitar. He really shook me. I think it was his whole style - the look and what he did with the guitar.
I love those Keith Richards solo records, but it's not the Rolling Stones.
I loved hard-rock bands, and I loved songwriters who told stories.
Metallica - they're so demonic, they're crazy, I don't know how they do it.
A lot of the 'Back In Black' stuff is really challenging.
I'm obsessed with Radiohead. They're just the greatest band on the planet.
Hard rock for me is AC/DC, Def Leppard, Tesla, Kiss. Metal tends to be louder, ruder, darker, like Judas Priest, Slayer, Iron Maiden.
Nick Zinner has been one of my favorite guitar players for a long time.
Without Metallica, I wouldn't play the way that I do.
T-Bone Walker was a big influence on just about every guitar player around.
Anytime you go to see a band with a guitar player, there's always a fear of guitar overkill! That's a funny question. If you went to a Taylor Swift concert or a Jay-Z show, people would think, 'Oh, my God, I hope I don't get guitar overkill.' People come to our show for guitar, and there can never be enough.
The one thing that Hendrix had that is unique among extraordinary guitar players is he had songs that were on the radio. His guitar genius was exposed to the masses by 'Foxy Lady.'
At 15, I started listening to hard rock and heavy metal, but I would say it was more hard rock because I liked Kiss, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, and eventually AC/DC.
I wasn't personally that familiar with the Classic Rock bands. That is where Jorn Viggo came in: he played me tons of that stuff - Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, plus a lot of bands with cool songs, riffs, vocals, etc. We really listened to tons of music.
