Jo Bonamassa – HuffPost 9.22.14

Mike Ragogna: What advice do you have for new artists?

Joe Bonamassa: You have to be yourself, and you have to find your own path through it all. I can sit here with an artist and explain every day that I’ve had for the last fifteen years, but that’s not necessarily going to work out for them, if they just copy every day that I had. You have to blaze your own path. You have to know your strengths and most importantly you have to know your weaknesses. You play to your strengths and you try to create diversionary tactics and smokescreens to at least divert from your weaknesses until you can address stuff to the point where they become strengths. And you’ve got to have this blind belief in yourself, that you will be successful, there’s no Plan B. You’re not going to stop going out there and doing it until you reach at least where you’re stable enough to make a decent living at it. That’s pretty much my advice. You have to be really strong-willed and not fear failure. You will fail, but you’ve got to pick yourself up and dust yourself off and go for it again.

MR: Is this the advice you’d have given yourself?

JB: Yeah! I failed at a bunch of stuff we’ve tried, but you pick yourself up and you go, “Okay, whatever, let’s be smart about it and carry on.”