Quotes from Paul Rodgers

A song isn't finished until it's played live, and then it moves on.

Life is so mundane, isn't it? It's great to hear a guitarist getting into it and the rhythmic section blasting, even if it's all meaningless.

I don't like lyrics to be overbearing. I like them to say something. But I'm not trying to change the world overnight. Something simple and understandable that people can relate their own everyday experiences to.

One doesn't have to sit through exams and go to universities to play rock n' roll.

I like following whatever's right for me at any given time. I could have stayed with Free for 40 years, but it becomes a corporate entity after a while, and once I become locked into it and governed by it and am expected to do a certain thing all of the time, I tend to want to move on.

With Free, we had phased out all of the blues material and wanted to phase in all original material, and the only song that stayed from our blues past was 'The Hunter' by Albert King. People just loved that. And I said, 'We have to write a song that will top that - otherwise, what are we doing here?' That was the birth of 'All Right Now.'

Once I'd become a songwriter, it just stays with you. You always want to write more songs because it's such a great feeling.

It's important to me to be able to hit the notes and just be able to fly when I sing.

I was brought up in a fairly emotionally repressed kind of society in Northeast England where one didn't express emotions and was expected to keep a stiff upper lip.

When I first started writing songs, I looked around at the bands that were making it, and they all had the original material. Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, the Stones - everybody was writing their own songs. That's the way that you established your own identity.

I liked the 12-bar blues because everybody could play it, but they could also play it their own way, and they could express their own emotions using that as a structure.

One of my dreams was always to have a piano - a room with a piano overlooking the ocean or a lake.

I love it when people come from all over the place in separate vehicles, and they all come to this venue and become one energy. When that happens, it's a very magical thing. I think that helps the world go around, and it's what we do as performers - bring people together.

I got the idea for the song 'Bad Company' when I saw a poster for the Jeff Bridges movie, and it reminded of an old Victorian picture that I'd once seen, and it said, 'Beware of bad company.' So I sat down at the piano and started to write the song.