You watch Rob get famous with that book!
John Waite is my favorite Don Henley voice outside of the Eagles.
Seriously, I really like his music too. And he's wry about the inevitable comparison:
One thing I noticed about you, and other singers who aren’t born in America, is you have a great tone when you sing. I was recently comparing you to Don Henley the other day. I said to my friend, “John Waite is just as good as Don Henley.”
Oh, I’m better (laughs).
But you don’t get the credit for it and that’s a big part of the reason why I wanted to do this interview. I think your tone is perfect. And the thing that I find interesting is whether it’s Tom Jones or whether it’s you, or another singer, a lot of times the diction of singers who aren’t from America is better than the diction of those who were born here.
Yeah, it’s funny. And you mentioned Tom; he really rips it up, he’s great. I mean, he’s really great. I don’t know. You look at Steve Marriott and Paul Rodgers, I mean, maybe you need to come from outside to bring something to it to make it bigger than what it is. I don’t know.
I was very conscious when I first came to America that there was a white-band thing where they were playing music that was kind of white. But in England we were all listening to blues, blues rock. I was just thinking, before I called, about the jukebox at my local coffee hangout when I was a kid. I was 14 and they had music by Otis Redding, the Temptations, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, you name it. But it was 99.9% American. Although my heritage is British, my heart is really American.
