Nuno Bettencourt
While you're learning guitar, figure out the drums, too. Not only does it help you have great timing, but it helps you understand how a band works.Collection: Learning
I never record anything like a demo, I just go for it.
As much as you put into it is as much as you get out of it.
Having a baby is one of the most wonderful things in your life, as well as the hardest thing in your life.
Who needs fan mail when you have the Internet?
We had a nightmare on our first album, and went through two producers. I decided, on the second album, to take the money that we were supposed to use for pre-production, and we went into a studio and cut the album with no producer. We finished the whole thing without telling the record company.
When you are in this business and this career, it's hard for any one thing to engulf you.
There's two facets to writing a song. There's you sitting in your room writing the sentiments of the song; the lyrics, the melody and the changes, and then there's the part where you go into the studio and you put clothing on it.
The touring part is really mixed. You love to play and you can't wait to go, but you don't want to leave.
Obviously the biggest change is that it's me by myself. When you don't have another band interpreting your songs or playing them the way that they have, it's bound to sound different.
My current project is my band, Population 1. We are writing, rehearsing and playing in Los Angeles.
Live are a really good band. I like Stone Temple Pilots, Radiohead I love. Even Oasis.
It's just a bunch of songs. I'm not trying to cure any major disease.
It's hard to know exactly what it sounds like to me. I'm in the studio and I write it. and that's it.
I wanted to do the whole album in black and white, and it really killed me that when you see it in the light it's got green in it. I don't know what the hell that was about.
I think I'm a music fan before anything else.
I definitely get affected by new stuff. There's a lot of older influences, but there's also newer stuff too.
I am affected by what is around. I don't think many people would admit that.
I always imagine later on these songs I could've played with a band, but it never worked out that way.
Half the bands I guarantee wouldn't at this point want Nuno to open for them.
Even with Extreme, I don't think you have a choice but to sort of have somewhat of an influence of the times.
As opposed to touring for three years and then going into the studio and writing an album, I think this record is representative of a lot of everyday people.
A band is like a marriage - you don't know why it works, but when it does, everything feels right.
I come from a big family of musicians, so I was lucky enough to grow up with guitars all around the house. Even though I didn't really know much at the time, my brother had a Les Paul Goldtop, and my dad always had this Fender or some bizarre Pedulla-Orsini guitar.
As for the first guitar I actually bought, I believe it was a Cherry Red Kramer! I think I bought it because Eddie Van Halen played Kramer, and I remember it had a Rockinger tremolo on it.
There is nothing wrong about being a rock n' roll guitar player.
Rihanna is so into rock, and she gives me an empty canvas to work with. I get to do wild solos and crunch up the rhythms. It's rock, it's R&B, it's hip-hop, it's funky - all totally up my alley.
You've got to love someone enough to hate them.
If you spend long enough with a bunch of guys, things will inevitably start to rankle. You're going to hate the way the singer comes into the room and opens the curtains 'cos he's done it too fast or whatever.
It's always flattering when someone covers a song. I mean, when you're a young band, and you're unsigned - to think that someday people would want to cover one of your songs - it's just mind-blowing.
We'd tour for a year and a half and do an album and then tour for another year and a half and do another album. We thought we were invincible, but someone should have said, 'You guys need to take a little time off.'
In the U.K., we always had a special relationship with the audiences because it wasn't 'More Than Words' that broke us: it was 'Get The Funk Out' that broke first. That was what we had always dreamed of.
With any success, there will always be a little bit of a negative.
With 'More Than Words,' we wrote that, so we are that. I'm just happy people can connect with any of our songs. If that song opened the floodgates for us to be able to tour the world over and over, how could I be unhappy with that?
What motivates us is always new music.
Everybody used to be busy writing songs - great songs - that became hits. Now everybody's writing hits. Everybody's desperately writing a hit because they know they can't survive if they don't have a hit. Where in the past, we were writing a song like 'More Than Words' on a porch, not really believing it was gonna be a hit.
I live in L.A., and whenever I get together with anybody to write, everybody is obsessed and fearful and wants to write a hit for everyone else. They wanna write a hit for Rihanna; they wanna write a hit for Katy Perry.
I'm sad for younger bands that don't have a home that they know they can go to, like the twenty-five labels that used to be around that they know they can hang their hat and know that they'll give 'em three, four, five albums to develop.
Nobody ever knows how big a song is going to be.
You don't really write a hit song - you write a great song, and then, if the public decides it's a hit, they take over from there. The song becomes its own monster.
We've never written anything to have success with it. We've written songs that we love.
It's hard being in a band. It's hard being in a relationship like that. But at the end of the day, when you have great fans, as corny as that sounds, if the fans show up and the passion that they have, they're the ones that make us want to keep going.
We can play all we want, but if nobody's there, if nobody feels anything with what we're playing, then what's the purpose?
We were never the cool band to like. They tried to put us into a hair-metal thing, but we weren't really Warrant or Poison. We were always outside the box. I think we had a little niche that nobody had - maybe the funkiness had something to do with it.
You believe that you're going to be forever young.
Even if we had the No. 1 video on MTV, and we had money and everything else, I think we'd always have more to do. I don't ever want to wake up in the morning and say, 'What are we gonna do today?' I'm afraid of that. I don't ever want to wake up and feel like we've conquered.
If you play music for no other reason than actually just because you love it, the skills just kinda creep up on you.Collection: Player
Great vocal track on "You can't cheat fate."Collection: Fate