Brian Setzer
Brian Setzer
Brian Robert Setzeris an American guitarist, singer and songwriter. He first found widespread success in the early 1980s with the 1950s-style rockabilly revival group Stray Cats, and revitalized his career in the late 1990s with his Swing revival band, The Brian Setzer Orchestra...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionGuitarist
Date of Birth10 April 1959
CityMassapequa, NY
CountryUnited States of America
dying veteran scene
Veteran performers are dying off, and new acts simply aren't emerging on the national scene.
delay sound different
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.
player feelings energy
To me, rockabilly music paralleled punk's energy and feeling, but the players were much better.
running cat people
I can't tell you how many people have asked me to show them Stray Cat Strut and that little diminished run on the C. I guess my brain is wired backwards. I don't know what possessed me to do that, but I did.
shoes blue down-and
You had to pick something like Blue Suede Shoes because it's the flagship of the Sun label, but then I wanted to dig down and find something like Rakin' and Scrapin'.
creating creating-something boxes
To keep creating something with this type of music, you have to take it out of the box.
songwriting
The songwriting has never really stepped forward from the '50's.
tired nashville careers
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.
gone gears way
I wanted to go back to Sun. Unfortunately, most of the gear is gone from Sun. The way I take it now, it's almost like a tourist destination. So, it would have been pretty difficult to have brought all the gear into Sun to make it like it was in the '50's.
thinking records wow
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.
would-be ears being-cool
I thought it would be cool to take flat-picking and put it in overdrive. I thought it would bend the ear.
mean years watson
I mean, what 16-year-old is going to listen to Doc Watson?
guitar hook use
I didn't want to take the guitar solos down note-for-note, but more or less use them as a map, and keep all the hooks from the guitar playing, and let myself come through.
thinking stuff months
I basically sat down for a month, with all the Sun stuff I could find and just picked out my favorites. I didn't think that they were indicative of '54 to '57, although I tried to stay within that period.