Quotes from Roger McGuinn

No one realized that I needed eyeglasses until I was 12 years old. My parents were writers, so I was around the sounds of words and developed a vocabulary with my sense of hearing. I play guitar by ear.

When The Byrds started country-rock, we had no idea there would be such a thing. We were just trying to honor the music. We started listening to country radio. We went to Nudie's and got cowboy clothes.

You can see it on the Internet: There's an argument going on continually about, 'What is folk music?' And I don't really want to get involved in that. It's an endless argument, a 'How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?' kind of argument.

How many years will you crawl through this castle, so satisfied and still wanting more?

I love being on the sea and the rolling of the ship, and for me, it's not really happening until we get a little wave action going, I love that feeling.

I open all my concerts with 'My Backpages,' written by Bob Dylan, and close them all with 'May the Road Rise to Meet You,' written by Roger McGuinn and Camilla McGuinn.

I got into computers back in the early '80s, so it was a natural progression of learning about e-mail in the mid-'80s and getting into the Internet when it opened up in the early '90s.

I'm not attracted to expensive things.

I didn't really enjoy reading until I married my wife and we began reading the Bible out loud to each other every day. I enjoy reading now, and there is a whole world of books out there to explore.

I went to school for folk music back when I was a teenager and learned hundreds of songs.

I started playing guitar back in '56. I was a teenager, and guitars had just come in, and I had a thing for it and got one. Started learning lead breaks from songs, because that was the easiest thing to do at the time. I had the guitar for two years before I learned any chords. Really.

I was raised a Roman Catholic and had to go to the eight o'clock Mass every morning and have communion and wear a tie, kind of like a restricted life style. Then in the '60s, we got wild and let it go and started looking in other places to see where God really was, and I came back to the Christian thing.

I think the Internet is an awful lot like FM radio was when it broke out in the late '60s. It's kind of a wild and wily kind of format. They could play 20 songs in a row that had the word 'blue' in them, or whatever they wanted to do.

I love being a troubadour. I travel around the world with my wife and play little theaters. We have a ball.

To me, being in the big time is not that big of a deal. I've been there; I know what it is. It's exciting, but it's also a lot of work and pressure. I love sort of flying under the radar where we can play theaters and sell CD's on the Internet, and it's really kind of a cool time.

But in my imagination this whole thing developed and I started mixing up old folk songs with the Beatles beat and taking them down to Greenwich Village and playing them for the people there.

I always got a kick out of it when they called it the California Sound because it really came out of Liverpool and Greenwich Village.

My favorite guitar now is my Martin HD-7 because it's got everything. It's got the jingle-jangle thing from the twelve string, it's got the flexibility of the six string, and the bass notes where you can do bass runs and that sort of thing.

No one realized that I needed eyeglasses until I was 12 years old. My parents were writers, so I was around the sounds of words and developed a vocabulary with my sense of hearing. I play guitar by ear.

Now, you can just get a laptop, get some software, put a microphone on it and make a record. You have to know how to do it. It does help if you've had 35 or 40 years of experience in the studio. But, it still levels the playing field so artists can record their own stuff.

People have told me that other artists have been influenced by my music, and it's flattering. It's a wonderful thing.

That's one of the things I like best about folk music is the beautiful melodies - and the harmonies - that exist in it. And of course, some of the stories, the story songs.

The first 12-string guitar I bought was probably around 1957.

The original Byrds were very much Beatles-influenced, and then we gradually got our own sound. We started mixing things together more.