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.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Shoe Suede Blues is ten years old this year. The Band consists of four members.
What you have to understand is that blues... it's in a line from the oldest forms of African music. If you're playing it like it's an echo of the past, it would be a lot less exciting, but this music lives today.
If you've got a good song, it's easy to play. But you can't make a bad song sound good no matter who you have to play on it.
We had to do a lot of rehearsals to get it so that it was playable. What it did was make you practice. That's good for any musician to have that kind of pressure. It brings things out of you that might not come out if you don't have to reach for something all the time.
To me, blues is more of a feel and a vibe, rather than sitting there and saying, 'Well, I'm gonna play bluesy now.'
If they played more blues, people would just get it - they try to hold it back but just about can't hold it back now because the blues is really going.
It's become uncool to play other people's songs, and that's absurd. It has got to change. It's the reason why everything's so mediocre.
I started to like blues, I guess, when I was about 6 or 7 years old. There was something about it, because nobody else played that kind of music.
As a guitar player, you can gravitate to the blues because you can play it easily. It's not a style that's difficult to pick up. It's purely emotive and dead easy to get a start with.
Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.