Boz Scaggs Quotations

My first love was the sound of guitar.

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.

I'm still trying to re-create a Ray Charles concert that I heard when I was fifteen years old, and all my nerve endings were fried and transformed, and electricity shot through me.

There is not a lot that keeps me glued to the radio as I used to be.

My songwriting and my style became more complex as I listened, learned, borrowed and stole and put my music together.

From the time I moved to San Francisco in 1967 to play with the Steve Miller Band, there was a lot of support in the music community for one cause or another, but this one was special because it was put on by people who understood where musicians hearts are.

This is a cause that musicians can take to heart because one of our main reasons for being is to share our music with other people, and this takes us to people who probably wouldn't otherwise get to hear music on quite this level.

I am not a jazz singer. I wouldn't place myself on that footing. I wouldn't even enter that arena.

I feel fortunate that I was able to step away from it when I wasn't interested.

I love working with the quartet. I have more freedom and flexibility.

I really just followed my musical instincts every step of my life.

I think that it can be said of a lot of artists, and myself included, that we made the same record over and over from the beginning.

Quite frankly, I've always listened to the black side of the radio dial. Where I grew up, there was a lot of it and there was a lot of live music around.

There's a whole lot of songs that men just can't do. The words are from another time and represent too much of an emotional commitment, whereas women can say that because of who they are.

I would say that I'm finding my voice in more ways than one.

I'm easily distracted by other things in the world around me.

A lot of what I have always done is do other singers.

As far as other instrumentalists, I used to love mellow sax players like Paul Desmond. I love piano.

I think the women - Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, Erykah Badu - are doing new conceptual things and using their voices to create new American music.

My earliest influences were things I heard in my household.

My parents were music lovers and collectors. It was around.

The short answer is, yes, I think I have become a better singer.

I felt that, in retrospect, there was a time in the late Seventies, after I had a string of hits and successes, as a performer and a recording artist, that I wasn't saying anything.

I listened to classical guitar and Spanish guitar, as well as jazz guitar players, rock and roll and blues. All of it. I did the same thing with my voice.

I'm not a jazz singer.

I love all kinds of music.

I was a guitar player first off.

So I think after taking a hiatus for some years and coming back, I'm finding my voice and my place again in the world of music around me.

It's been done in all the right spirit. The people who put this thing together did it for all the right reasons.

And if it's not there - if that little melody is not in my head, or if I just don't really feel like picking up the guitar - I just don't do it.