“I tried when I was 13, when my grandparents gave me an acoustic guitar...” — Eric Clapton Quote

I tried when I was 13, when my grandparents gave me an acoustic guitar, and I tried for a year. It hurt so much to play. I mean, the fingertips hurt so much, I gave up.

In playing, I suppose my greatest gift was to express the way I felt or the willingness to express myself.

Leave bands, go back to obscurity if I choose to, without a great sense of loss of security because it's all been based on the fact that I did it on my own or was doing, enjoying doing it on my own in the first place.

It was stumbling on to really the bible of the blues, you know, and a very powerful drug to be introduced to us and I absorbed it totally, and it changed my complete outlook on music.

The way I think about things or hear things in my head is actually much closer to acoustic instruments. I don't have weird synthesized fantasy of music in my head.

I got my first guitar when I was 11. It was an electric, and I can remember just wanting to be Avril Lavigne! But I got annoyed with having to plug it in and play with amps and pedals and stuff. Then I got given a cheap acoustic, a Tanglewood, and I thought it was awesome because I could play it anywhere!

Let's face it - the electric guitar is way sexier than the acoustic.

Sting I've seen a few times, and he really inspired me in the sense that he breaks the songs down a lot and will take a different approach. He'll take an acoustic approach to them; he'll rearrange them for the live stage.