I can never make up my mind if I'm happy being a flute player, or if I wish I were Eric Clapton.
When Eric Clapton cut 'After Midnight,' he sold so many records and it was so big at the time, I decided that I would pursue the songwriting thing. I was 34 years old at that time. I'd been down the pike and back before I had any success at all.
People are familiar with my songs, especially through Eric Clapton. But I have a hard time drawing a crowd, because I have been a songwriter.
I know he played on the last record but I don't wake up in the middle of the night thinking of Eric Clapton.
You stop anybody on any street, around the world, and they know who Eric Clapton is. They don't know who I am!
Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck made me an Anglophile. I listened to English and Irish artists as a kid, and they were way louder, heavier, and faster than the traditional blues that I was listening to.
I was a kid that grew up listening to The Beatles and The Stones and Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, and I wanted all of that in there. But at the same time, a large part of my playing is Tony Iommi and Billy Gibbons. I'm just a sum total of all of the guitar players that I think were really cool.
I'm the youngest of three boys, and my oldest brother was super into Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton and played guitar. I wanted to be like him, so I asked for a guitar of my own for Christmas in '93.
I'm going to try and make you take the Beatles and Eric Clapton as seriously as the Berlin Philharmonic and Simon Rattle.
Whenever I sing blues from the '50s or the kind of blues that you might have heard Eric Clapton or Duane Allman emulate, I often feel the similarity of some of the ragtime stuff I sang early on. A lot of the phrasing and the harmonization is the same.
