Richie Sambora

Richie: (about being checked into rehab) I was just drinking too much, and I needed to get my life back together.

Richie: When I was a teenager, Frampton Comes Alive was such a huge record. I liked that it was a live album and I loved to see bands live. Joe Walsh of The Eagles also used talk box amazingly. Those were the main guys.

Richie: I try to look at most of my solos as a musical piece within the song, not, say, showing off.

Richie: I think that we do have universal appeal from a multi-generational standpoint. People really grab a hold of our music -- everybody from real young kids like 10-year-olds to ... I remember when I was married, my father-in-law telling me that the lyrics of 'It's My Life' were very, very profound to him: 'I ain't going to live forever. I just want to live while I'm alive.' [Recently] we did a cancer benefit for my dad's cancer hospital. You know, my dad passed away almost a year ago, and as I was singing the lyrics of the song, those lyrics became very profound to me. The lyrics of our songs somehow translate beyond what we would say when we write them, and it becomes everybody else's lyrics.

Richie: Chris [Daughtry] is unbelievable. I mean, obviously, he was a fan of Bon Jovi's when he was on American Idol. He was doing a bunch of our songs and stuff like that. We gave him a test drive over in New Jersey. ... We had five different opening acts [in 10 nights], with My Chemical Romance, the [All-American] Rejects, and Gretchen [Wilson] and Big & Rich and him, and he went over really well with our audience.

Richie: The Rolling Stones had a lot of country elements to them in the beginning ... 'Silver Train' and all that kind of stuff. There's a definite link - for me anyway - between country and rhythm 'n' blues and that whole kind of area down there. There's some Southern twang blues thing that goes on that really created rock 'n' roll, so it's going to be an element. I think that's going to stay in our music somewhat.

Richie: We walked in there with a blank pad and a pen. We had no idea what was going to go on and we kind of cruised. We went over to people's houses and just wrote. And it was mind-blowing. There's a lot of great, great songwriters in Nashville, and we wanted to plug in and see what was going on. You know, we just love Nashville. It's a fantastic town. As far as musicians go, it's the Hollywood of music. You know, when you're an actor, you want to go to Hollywood. When you're a musician, you want to go to Nashville. I mean, you pull up to the gas station and then you could bet that the gas attendant is going to be a musician or a songwriter or a wannabe.

Richie: Obviously, just because you're a rock 'n' roll star doesn't make you exempt from any of life's tragedies. I had a couple of them kind of mount up on me a bit. But, you know, the band is obviously a great, great aid in pulling me up and helping me out of all those situations -- obviously my mom and my friends but the band and, also, the fans and the work. About a week after I got detoxed and stopped all that stuff, I went right back to work.

Richie: (talking about his new tour mate, Chris Daughtry) He went over really, really well. We're kind of fast friends with him.

Richie: (about the new album "Lost Highway") It sounds like us. It's just really good songs. It's well-crafted songs and I think people are gonna dig the songs.

Richie: (talking about his rehab) I'm sober, I'm good. But I'm going back just to do finish this weekend. I figured, why not get to the bottom of this and really understand it?

Richie: With a lot of the stuff I played on the Bon Jovi hits, it wasn't about developing solos, but to play stuff that was melodic and memorable. So the solos were more like melodic interludes. You can almost imagine them either played by another instrument or by an orchestra. So they are more melodic and melodically-oriented than solo-oriented.

Richie: Right now, I'm just trying to focus on getting my life back on track - being a single dad and getting better from addiction issues that I've had. It's not so sexy, but these days, I'm often on stage in front of thousands and then I go home and take out the trash and become Mr Mom.