Brian Setzer

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

“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.”

“Robert Plant is one of the nicest people you'll ever meet, never mind rock star. He's so down to earth.”

“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.”

“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.”

“To me, rockabilly music paralleled punk's energy and feeling, but the players were much better.”

“I like a good pompadour.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“People out there maybe know who Junior Parker is and some of those Sun Records blues guys.”

“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.”

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