Quotes from Brian Setzer

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Robert Plant is one of the nicest people you'll ever meet, never mind rock star. He's so down to earth.

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.

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

It is hard to play Blue Suede Shoes. I know everyone has heard it 10 million times, and that makes it even harder to play it, but there's a very laid back tempo on that. I was surprised at how slow it really was.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Elvis Presleys' first album had more energy and more enthusiam than any other album at the time - when it was released it just blew everything else out. It changed the whole landscape of music

There's a fine line between pleasure and pain. Love me like a ball and chain.

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.

If you listen to everybody's opinions, I mean, I always say I'd be digging a ditch on the side of the road now if I had listened to what everybody told me what to do. You know, you have to follow your heart, you have to.

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.

I love Glen Campbell. He never gets a mention.

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