Paul Rodgers

“One overindulges when you're younger, and you pay the price in later years. But I always realized how important it was for me to take care of myself and my voice if I was gonna have a voice when I was older.”

“In Free, we managed ourselves, and it was too tough for us to handle all of what that entailed when we got to touring America.”

“I don't like lyrics to be overbearing. I like them to say something. But I'm not trying to change the world overnight. Something simple and understandable that people can relate their own everyday experiences to.”

“We come from a generation where the music was very innovative, a lot of it coming out of blues and influenced by blues: the idea was that you would jam on things, and you'd try things out. You took a journey, and you took a left turn, and you experimented live right there in the moment.”

“When I was 14, I heard Otis Redding in a club local to me, and I was blown away. It leaped out at me and went straight to my heart. I set my sights on singing like that.”

“When I play solo, that's when I put it all together. I go through all of the songs that I've written wtih all of the different bands; that, for me, tells its own story, and the DVDs really enforce that.”

“Nobody should attempt to do Freddie Mercury impressions.”

“I was conscious of vocalists from an early age.”

“'Shooting Star' started out as the arrangement on the record, and it's developed into a real audience-participation song, just from playing it.”

“I liked the 12-bar blues because everybody could play it, but they could also play it their own way, and they could express their own emotions using that as a structure.”

“I'm a big fan of Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac.”

“One of my dreams was always to have a piano - a room with a piano overlooking the ocean or a lake.”

“I love it when people come from all over the place in separate vehicles, and they all come to this venue and become one energy. When that happens, it's a very magical thing. I think that helps the world go around, and it's what we do as performers - bring people together.”

“I've been influenced by so many great people , like Sam Moore, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, so many great blues and soul artists that I completely revere. So it's strange for me, actually, to hear somebody say, 'Oh, I was deeply influenced by your music.'”

“With Free, we were teenagers, and, ummm, there was a lot of raging hormones.”

“After leaving Queen, I decided to stop doing those mega-four-month tours. I go out for a month, and my dog recognizes me when I come home.”

“There are so many challenges and different parts to the job of singing. When you're in the studio, you have to be really, really, precise. You've got to keep everything clean and nice because that's going to be something that's down forever. And then you go onstage, and it's much more in the moment.”

“I toured with Lynyrd Skynyrd as a solo artist, many years ago. I love those guys.”

“I met Paul Kossoff for the first time when I was playing in the back of a pub room in Finsbury Park in London in 1967. It was kind of a blues thing going on, and he came up and said, 'I'd like to have a jam.' So he came up and jammed with me, and I just loved his playing right from the start.”

“I just sort of grew up with music always in the background like a soundtrack. And it really hit me hard when The Beatles came along, like so many people. That got me started digging back further to Chuck Berry.”