"Led Zeppelin, goddamn! I don't think they made a bad record! There's that classic line from Cameron Crowe's movie Fast Times At Ridgemont High where they're cruising around, talking about how to get chicks. And the guy says: ""If you wanna score with a chick, turn out side two of volume four!"" I've used that a few times actually. It works [laughs]! Anyway if it didn't work, it was a nice soundtrack while it was going down. Jimmy Page is another guitar player that means a lot to me. Every member of that fucking band: John Paul Jones was an amazing writer, arranger and producer, as well as Jimmy. Plus John Bonham and Robert Plant... that's one of the greatest rock & roll bands of all times. It's just straight-up, fucking sexy, kick ass and shit, man! All the way from dirty low-down rock & roll to the biggest orchestral tracks like ‘Kashmir’. They travelled a lot of ground while keeping their roots intact, the blues. You know, certain bands really resonate in certain areas and that was one band that was always popular up there where I come from, the Northwest. You have at least ten fucking Zeppelin songs that you can jam with anybody at any time."

"Metallica is a beast that is still living and breathing strong. They continue to set the bar, man. Nobody's fucking bigger or better in my opinion. I know all those guys and became good friends with them. That record is where I got in. The track that got me in was ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’. I've been able to play that with those guys on a handful of occasions. It's one of the coolest things in the world to fucking be able to do that. Except for a few, I played with all these bands. I got my bass player from Ozzy, my guitars from Eddy. They become kind of friends and peers. That's pretty cool. I still get a little geeky as a fan around those guys. I got to keep myself in check as it's like: ""Fuck, man!"". I don't think you ever lose touch with being a music fan, ‘cause that's more than half the reason you probably did it anyway. You are trying to make music like they did, and maybe some kid down the line will be talking about your record the same way, and may be you will turn him on to be able to make his own music."

"People kept saying that Odessey and Oracle was a forgotten classic and that The Zombies never got the attention they deserve, that’s when I checked them out and this song really stood out to me. It’s just on the right side of being over the top, because he’s picked this unsettling line - 'My hands won’t stop shaking,' - and he’s just repeating it again and again and the repetition alone is so powerful. “It’s not judging, it’s not saying what was so terrible, just that his hands won’t stop shaking. The more times you hear that the more you think, 'Why? What the hell’s going on?' I think that’s much more powerful than some big description about what happened, or even how he’s feeling about it. “It’s definitely something I’ve used lots of times in our songs, repeating something that might not seem that big, but once you’ve heard it a few times it starts to play with your mind a bit. Meaning becomes doubled and tripled and you begin to wonder why they’re repeating it. It’s a weird thing to do, repeating yourself; if you’re talking to someone, it’s kind of insane. I like the insanity that comes across in that."