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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Brian Setzer

Afraid

Crazy

Different

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Brian Setzer

Take

Road

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "