"I was very fortunate when I was 19, to hook up with Steve Vai, and I played with him and sang with him for several years. Steve's an incredible guitar player, fascinating musician and.... incredibly... theoretically proficient. Ya know? Like, he
really knows his instrument, he knows his notes, he knows what he's playing, he knows why he's playing it. That was
never actually me. I have no idea what I'm doing, and I think in alot of ways that's been very liberating for me, because there's nothing, there's no 'rules' to break if there are no rules, right? So what I found, after a while of playing with people who were better than me, and who really knew what they wanted to play, I found that I became tired of 'technique' and incessant sort of practicing to come along with it....
I think that that's the interesting part of the instrument as well, is, when You... when You're interested in it, the 'notes' come easily to You, in terms of lead play, and when You're disinterested in it, it becomes strictly a song writing tool...."
[On why he prefers Open C tuning] "Because it's pretty simple, compared to standard tuning" - He also prefers the simplest tunings so that he can focus on singing.
[On Music Theory] "I don't really know theory,
like, at all. In fact, when we were doing the orchestral stuff, they were like: "Was that a C#?" and I was like: "Well.... it's the seventh fret" sooo... yeah, that didn't really help."