Quotes

The world is a tougher place to live in than it was back then, as we come into the computer age.

I would like to be able to do a song with Ray Charles, before we both get too old.

I was in Germany when the wall came down.

Once you get into entertaining a quarter of a million people, it's a very weird place to be.

Over the years, I've worked with just about everybody.

God, I'm just a fat bald guy, 60 years old, singing the blues, you know?

For me, the focus are songs, which really get the audience moving.

It's interesting, as I said on the last tour in America, the audience actually came out, they had to have been the kind of fans who listened to my music via their parents, you know what I mean?

I had a job when I was 16 at a gas fitter, which was a bit like a pipe fitter.

I love songs that have a rocking and grooving feeling.

I've been touring now since about '68.

It's all a matter of hearing what I like and seeing if I can make it fit into my style.

It's nice to get a response from the artists that I cover.

Unfortunately, I was in New York when 9/11 happened.

Europe is usually where I am usually galloping around.

Back then, I and most rockers, loved Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis... you know in the '60s.

Don't go on American Idol (2002), I think you'll spend the rest of your life living it down and I think it's getting kinda scary, isn't it?

Well, we have this place in Telluride, Colorado. It's somewhere I can just get away and relax and think.

I have always been a sucker for ballads, but you have to be careful these days, you can't overload people.

Yeah, one of the main ways is for songs that make me want to move.

Some of the songs I do once in a while that I kinda... my set list is basically like my hits, there is a good reason why they are there; people really like them.

Well, over the years, I've developed a stable of songs of which I'm known for and never get tired of singing.

I have sung to large crowds since then, and there is a feeling that once you get over 100,000 people, you kind of lose the control element, you don't know if you are really getting through or not.

[on his distinctive scream when performing] People go, "Wow, what's that all about?". It's a falsetto really, and it takes a bit of learning. I just discovered it by accident by getting excited one night. I just did this yell, and I was like "What was that?". So that's how it came to be in "Little Help". I did it when we were first learning the song and it became an integral part of it.