Tom Scholz
Tom Scholz
Donald Thomas "Tom" Scholzis an American rock musician, inventor, engineer, and philanthropist, best known as the founder of the band Boston. He is also the inventor of the Rockman portable guitar amplifier. He has been described by Allmusic as "a notoriously 'un-rock n' roll' figure who never enjoyed the limelight of being a performer," preferring to concentrate almost exclusively on his music, and in more recent years, spending much of his time working with charities...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth10 March 1947
CityToledo, OH
CountryUnited States of America
If you listen to my tapes, you'd hear 14 different ways to arrange the rhythm guitar behind the harmony vocal, and then 14 different ways with a different vocal. You'd have to really be a music lover to sit through that and find it entertaining. I enjoy it, but I'm easy to please.
I take chances. I don't limit myself. I don't think anybody who listens to Boston would have predicted hearing a female rapper on the beginning of the song 'Sail Away.' But that's what fit.
I can sit down at a piano or with a guitar and just chug away for hours and be perfectly content with whatever comes out. But when it comes to something that somebody else is going to listen to, then I do feel a great deal of pressure to do something that's exceptional, at least in what I consider to be at the limits of what I can do.
The lyrics are always the last thing I do. I always have a recording of basic tracks and maybe some of the lead work. I'll sit back and listen to it, and I'll just concentrate on what kind of feeling it gives me. My goal writing the lyrics is to not disrupt that feeling.
I don't listen to the radio in the car, and I do that because I don't want to be influenced.
Im a huge fan of Joe Walsh and a big James Gang fan. A lot of what I know about playing the guitar I learned from listening to him.
The studio work is the nasty, tedious, hard and nerve-wracking part, interrupted by moments of exhilaration. Playing live is the chance to actually have some fun and get on a stage.
The pressure is all self-imposed, and it's to live up to the expectations of people who are going to shell out their hard-earned cash to listen to the music. It's actually more than that, though. I wouldn't want to make a record that didn't live up to my expectations.
When I first started recording, I was told by all of the experts in the business that the kind of music that I was doing was never going to sell. That disco was the coming thing and it was going to take over and what I was interested in was a minor sideline.
Fun is when you're writing a song and you're trying a rough shot at a demo and... it works. That's when it's fun. After that, it's work.
I would be involved with music whether I had a career or not. I'm always going to be writing songs and recording them.
No one was more surprised that that first Boston record took off than the record company itself.
There are an awful lot of people out there that don't want to see Boston go away, and I'm one of them.
The problem is that once I start on a song and get a rough idea of where I might go with an arrangement, I try dozens, sometimes hundreds, of different things on a song. The bass, the backing guitars, the lead guitars, the keyboards. It's a long process. It's like 100 steps forward and 99 steps back.