Musician

There are so many challenges and different parts to the job of singing. When you're in the studio, you have to be really, really, precise. You've got to keep everything clean and nice because that's going to be something that's down forever. And then you go onstage, and it's much more in the moment.

I've been influenced by so many great people , like Sam Moore, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, so many great blues and soul artists that I completely revere. So it's strange for me, actually, to hear somebody say, 'Oh, I was deeply influenced by your music.'

Every day, every time I sing, I feel blessed, really, to be able to do that. It's like having wings, in a way. It's a bit like flying sometimes, because you go off into another realm. And a whole lot of people come with you. It's amazing.

If you look at my history, my history is that of forming bands rather than joining them.

The Skynyrds and I go back to the '70s and the days and nights at the Hyatt House on Sunset in L.A., aka the Riot House.

With Free, we were teenagers, and, ummm, there was a lot of raging hormones.

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.

I like to be in control of my own destiny.

In order to write music, you need lots of Tabasco sauce.

Blues is such a dynamic and ever-changing system of music.

I am proud to be a Canuck.

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.

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.

When Free came together, there was a creative magic around us, something unique and different.

I met Paul Kossoff for the first time when I was playing in the back of a pub room in Finsbury Park in London in 1967. It was kind of a blues thing going on, and he came up and said, 'I'd like to have a jam.' So he came up and jammed with me, and I just loved his playing right from the start.

I just try to keep an open mind, and that's the way a lot of good things happen.

With any band, there's two sides - there's the image, and there's the music.

There were personality clashes in Free, really. I think it's as simple as that; I think we felt we weren't leaving each other enough room to develop in our own way, and we were restricting each other. So we said, let's go different ways.

The one thing I loved about blues and soul was the way they taught the world how to express such deep feelings.

When I was in my teen years and in my 20s and even 60s, it was okay to drop everything and disappear and become a road warrior for all those months. But after a while you get... y'know, one likes to have some home life.