Brian Setzer's Quotes

It's not about how loud you turn the amp up. That's not what makes it sound big. What makes it sound big is fooling around with different delays and reverb settings.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

With the Stray Cats at least, we really took the music somewhere else. First, we wrote our own songs. That's a real weak point in modern classics if you do rockabilly or blues.

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.

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

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

I like a good pompadour.

I love Glen Campbell. He never gets a mention.

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

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

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.

Just because you put super great musicians together, it doesn't mean you're going to have that chemistry as a band.

People out there maybe know who Junior Parker is and some of those Sun Records blues guys.

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.

The biggest challenge for me was Get Rhythm. I don't know why.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.