Brian Setzer Quotes

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.

I basically sat down for a month, with all the Sun stuff I could find and just picked out my favorites. I didn’t think that they were indicative of ’54 to ’57, although I tried to stay within that period.

I’m not God’s gift to rockabilly. There’s great players out there, and some of them deserve a lot more than they’ve gotten.

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

Rock and roll and swing never quite mixed. Rock and roll came in and just blew everything out of the water. Big bands were dead.

Normally, you go into the recording studio, make a record and then take it on the road and you think… wow… I could have done THIS to it, or something.

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.

I love Glen Campbell. He never gets a mention.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The songwriting has never really stepped forward from the ’50’s.

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.

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

A lot of people put all that stuff on a pedestal, and they won’t touch it. But I don’t think that’s the reason they did that. I think they played that stuff out of pure joy.

Mark Winchester has left the band. He’s decided that he’s tired of the road and just wants to concentrate on his career in Nashville. I don’t blame him at all. He’ll certainly be missed.

I started a big band when grunge was popular. I mean, that didn’t make much sense.

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

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

We weren’t afraid to mix some crazy styles into the standard rockabilly look. We also took a lot of different musical influences that were part of that era.

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

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.