I think doing a record with B.B. King allowed me the opportunity to blend two different generations across the board and make a song that I hope is extremely impactful.
I think it's hard to put a finger on my music. My music has always been an amalgamation of everything I listen to, which includes everything and anything under the sun. Hip-hop to country to R&B to pop, all the things I'm inspired by find a way into what I do.
I was singing totally jazz then, but when I heard the Beatles and heard the gospel influence and everything, I just said, 'I can make jazz with R&B.'
After I left Dream Theater, and I was doing Avenged Sevenfold, Twisted Sister... all these other things, I made a lot of new fans in a lot of new areas.
The other guys in Hootie were into rock. I brought the country influence.
It's incredibly cool that R & B artists like Kanye and the Weekend, who from a completely different genre to us have tapped into 'The Hurting.'
I started as a jazz musician, not a singer, then I became a rock 'n' roll artist with Aphrodite's Child.
I feel like we're very lucky in the sense that Dawes can be the kind of band that plays with Bright Eyes or M. Ward but that also plays with Bob Dylan.
In some articles written about me, writers have said I'm a link between the old and the new, and I think, in a certain sense, that's legitimate.
Music is music. It doesn't matter if I am trying to aim at country or trying to aim at pop.
I am genuinely into soul, R&B and hip hop - all these genres that get slapped under the 'soul' genre. That spoke to me more than it did to my punk-rock friends. And punk spoke more to me than it did to my soul friends. I basically didn't fit comfortably in either world.
I always wanted to merge heavy metal with pop music, but I think that because I grew up more with pop, the Beatles and the Stones, I tended to affiliate myself with those projects.
I'm trying to use people like Meredith Monk and Philip Glass and Terry Riley as the backing tracks for new pop songs. It's really hard trying to use the format and write a pop song on top of avant-garde music, so we'll see. It could be cool, or it could totally flop.
To me, rock n' roll is rock n' roll. I try to think of it as that. To me, Funkadelic and Metallica exist in the same world.
People like to compartmentalise music, especially African-American music, but it's really one thing. One very wide thing. I mean, it's like all those great records by Marvin Gaye and James Brown back in the day - there are tonnes of jazz musicians playing on them.
It's not a random chance that we have Alanis Morissette. She didn't evolve out of a null and void. She came from a former template. She borrowed styles and sounds from a very limited set of other artists.
I try to take elements from all kinds of music. Even if I'm listening to anything off the wall, like Britney Spears, there might be a certain way someone did something, that I can feel, in some hip-hop flavor.
Genres aren't closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.
I think Ray Charles did as much as anybody when he did his country music album. Ray Charles broke down borders and showed the similarities between country music and R&B.
Jazz goes into folk music, into rock music. Jazz is in practically everything except classical music where they're reading the same music all the time, the same way, the same tempo every night.
Testify' went from a clean Motown song to straight psychedelic. Loud and feedback and people was loving it, because Motown was ending now.
That's kinda what happened to me: I listened to jazz, country, R&B, rock 'n' roll. And when I sat down to write a song, I had all these influences comin' through.
My brothers came home with country, jazz, everything... it was always very normal to me to make any type of music. It was possible to fuse all the sounds, so it never sounded confusing to me to mix jazz and dubstep.
Who's to say a blues man can't play rock and roll?
Anything I do with Team Sleep, I'd do with Deftones as well.
