I've grown up on gospel and blues music, and now it's a huge part of who I am.

Every time the guys were knocked out by my guitar playing and the girls were knocked out by the type of songs I did. That set us apart from the average blues band.

The basis of everything that I plugged into when I was younger was blues, and it always stayed with me.

The blues brings you back into the fold. The blues isn't about the blues, it's about we have all had the blues and we are all in this together.

I'd do the blues all the time if I could, that's what I'm into. But people just don't like to hear it.

A lot of what I listened to growing up was blues, but also folk and indie music. So there's this marriage of songs that structurally are quite bluesy. Sound-wise, there's a lot of indie as well. But you can't really say I'm pop-blues, because that's insulting to blues. It just can't exist.

I'd do the blues all the time if I could, that's what I'm into. But people just don't like to hear it.

I did a lot of 'NYPD Blues' and 'Law & Orders' and a couple of other ones that were shot in New York earlier in my career.

I began writing with Mike Pinder and eventually we went on to form a new band called The M&B, which later became The Moody Blues, what I would call a progressive blues band.

When I'd hear something that sounded like I could follow it - most of those big band jazz tunes are blues anyway - I would hum it and play with the fiddle while I was humming.

I was doing something of my own after I left The Moody Blues, I went away, lived in Spain for a while.

I haven't lost my blues roots.

There's a musicologist named Peter van der Merwe whose theory is that the blues generates tune families, and that their similarity to each other is in fact part of the pleasure you take in them - rather than the differentiation in which Jerome Kern and George Gershwin indulged to great effect.

You ask any Olympian what the year after the Olympics is like - you always get the Olympic blues.

The Ramones are not an oldies group; they are not a glitter group. They don't play boogie music, and they don't play the blues.

Blues was my first love. It was the first thing where I said, 'Oh man, this is the stuff.' It just sounded so raw and honest, gut-bucket honest. From then I started rebelling.

If I'm at a party and someone puts on a Blues Brothers tape, I tend to go nuts.

When I got out of high school, I joined a local blues band in Philadelphia - Woody's Truck Stop.

I think I'm more influenced, just in general, not by blues artists, but more by stuff from Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder. Stevie Wonder is probably my biggest musical influence of all. And Donny Hathaway.

Whenever I sing blues from the '50s or the kind of blues that you might have heard Eric Clapton or Duane Allman emulate, I often feel the similarity of some of the ragtime stuff I sang early on. A lot of the phrasing and the harmonization is the same.