Slash can take three notes and make a beautiful solo. And that's one thing I've always really admired about his guitar playing. I'm a huge Slash fan all around.

If I start to go around and look for stuff that's being written about me or about the band, chances are I'm not going to find what I'm looking for or what I'd want to be hearing. If I go out and look for it and it's out there, I'm really going to notice when it's not. And I'd hate to think that that would impact any decisions I'm making.

That's what's nice about playing festivals, too. You're on this huge, enormous stage and you've got 200,000 watts of power blowing your guitars all over the place. It sounds good.

We don't think about how the songs are going to translate so much during the writing process. Once the song is recorded, and once we're mixing, that's when it occurs to me. Then you start rehearsing to play shows. I never concern myself about how we're going to pull it off live, because I know we'll figure out a way to do it.

I guess my guitar heroes shifted from people like Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix to people like Johnny Marr or John Squire.

It's how I learned to play guitar - sitting with Led Zeppelin and Cheap Trick records, backing the needle up and learning how to play along. When the band started, by doing something that was very obvious to us and sort of traditional, it set us apart at the time from what was happening musically.