Randy Bachman

“I don't think that bands that make it on their first album are as strong as bands that don't: there is nowhere to go but down.”

“I look on most religions as fear-based rather than love-based. I've drifted away from all that. Yes, I think I'm more spiritual. I just don't go and pretend every Saturday or Sunday that I'm in this wonderful club. I'm exploring.”

“My life has been a whole series of accidents, some of them happy, some not.”

“My love, growing up on the Prairies, was country music.”

“When you get successful, you can do pretty much whatever you want.”

“I never get tired of performing to people who want to hear me. Hell, that's my handshake to the world. I'm doing just what I've wanted to do since that day I was 15 and heard Lenny Breau play the guitar.”

“The local music community here was dying for a place to record, so we started doing acoustic, folk and bluegrass and then did rock projects for other bands, as well as for my son Tal and my own work.”

“Radio was my lifeline as a kid growing up in Winnipeg in the 1950s. It connected me with the wider world outside our little prairie city.”

“You take all the things that frighten you, and when you can get them to work for you all of sudden people are calling you a success.”

“I think if you're a painter, you paint; if you're a golfer, you golf; if you're a fisherman, you fish; if you're a musician, you play music.”

“You don't have to have a great voice to sing, just a distinctive one. But make sure you say the words clearly and tell a story.”

“I learnt one thing in the past or in my life: the only person you can change is yourself, and it has to come from within.”

“When I pull into a city and I rent a car and it's Nashville, or it's London, or I'm driving in the taxi to the hotel, and on comes one of my songs, it's like, 'Oh my God, they're still playing these songs on the radio.' And you still feel tearful and very grateful that somebody still likes these songs that you made up.”

“People have made a living deconstructing Lennon and The Beatles songs because of their compositional sophistication. But what's so exciting about John is that he never had any of that training on musical theory; something just spoke to him, and he just knew what sounded right.”

“Every night we all felt grateful to be there, stunned at the amount of people that are there, and stunned at their reactions. They go crazy; they know every lyric from eight years of age to eighty. It's unbelievable.”

“The fact that the internet is so active; people can now speak to me indirectly.”

“It's nice to get any awards, whether it's lifetime achievement or the Keith Richards award for being alive one more year.”

“I listened to it last night for the first time since we started this project. I went out to my car and put it in and went to an empty parking lot and just listened and read the little pamphlet that came with it. After two or three songs I burst into tears.”

“Those albums are so important to me because, for the first time, I was making my own music, paying for it, finding strengths in it, and going through the process of finding the right music for the record.”

“When I was five I had violin lessons.”