I'm the star of stage, screen, and television now, but I'm also available for children's parties and bar mitzvahs.
My only expenses are probably guitar strings and records.
I'm not a very spiritual guy when it comes to music. I remember hearing Carlos Santana say that angels helped him write his songs. And I thought, 'Really, angels?
I come from a small town and I come from a background where we didn't have money to travel. I thought I'd have to join the military to get to Europe. So I'm thrilled to travel.
Any time you talk about your own stuff you sound self-aggrandising.
I think I've had the slowest, most methodical career in the business.
I did all my guitar playing at my house. And then finally, I was throwing hay and stuff working in Stockton and somebody offered - somehow they had heard me singing at the house and said: Hey, I'll hire you for our fraternity party or sorority party. And I said: Well, are they going to pay me? And he said: Yeah, we'll pay you 50 bucks.
I still don't know if I'm good enough or if it's a calling or a vocation or something, but the talent part is out. My desire to do it is undoubted. I just love doing this.
I grew up, I was going I want to be Jerry Lee Lewis. Only I can't play piano and sing that good.
I'm not the kind of guy to talk about angels: I'm a very pragmatic kind of guy.
I write my own songs, and I only see their flaws.
I put on music and I'm washing my car. And I put on music if you have somebody and you're trying to make love. You put that on in the background and you go, maybe this will be romantic.
I picked songs that I've been singing my whole life that stuck with me. I tried to pick stuff that was a variety. And I think the same way I always imagine that people are going to play the record at their house and I imagine them doing stuff with music on, like the way I am.
I don't know what people think in making record is like. But basically, I got a bunch of spaghetti and spaghetti sauce, and the whole band was staying at my house and we had a ball.
I think I had kind of an advantage. When I was growing up, my dad had just got out of jail and he had a great record collection. He had - it was all - these were the songs. So I heard a lot of these songs, like, my whole life, so for me it was easy. I already knew what I was going to sing.
I think everybody in my generation, we wanted to be Elvis.
I think I'm in a really nice position, where I'm sure I could do another show if I wanted to do one, but right now the main thing in my mind is writing songs.
If you listen to old Jerry Lee Lewis records, he'll always - about nine times out of 10 have the lyrics different than the original record is.
I've been gone on the road for the past three years; maybe I've been home for two or three weeks in a year. I literally live - it's like one of those old movies where they show a train, and pages of a calendar are peeling away like leaves, and then there's a picture of me with gray hair.
The one thing I’ve always had going for me was people’s low expectations. Nobody ever expects a whole hell of a lot from me.
I'm a natural ham. It doesn't bother me to perform.
I hate modern car radios. In my car, I don't even have a push-button radio. It's just got a dial and two knobs. Just AM. One knob makes it louder, and one knob changes the station. When you're driving, that's all I want.
The things that got me through grade school are helping me out later in life. It's like, I show up on time. If you buy a ticket to one of my shows, I'll show up. I'll be there. And if it says 10:00, I'll be on stage at 10:00.
My mom and dad played this music all the time when I was growing up, so to me songs by Jerry Lee and Fats Domino are the classics, they're the best songs ever.
If I would get an album out every eight months and if I would write songs that were more up-tempo and try to focus more on making singles, then I could probably get more attention. But I don't think the albums would be very fun to listen to, and it would be a drag for me.
