Sometimes you can fix something that went wrong with what you do next and make it better than it would have been if it hadn't gone wrong, as an improviser, and I do know how to do that.

There is a tendency to want to isolate a little bit, from people that might look at me from a fan position, because it's hard to be a real person around them, and I really want that when I'm not out on tour and in that sort of public eye.

I think I'm getting better at being verbal. I used to have a lot of problems with it. I had my own little demons that I was fighting, and I used the banjo as an escape.

Sometimes you can fix something that went wrong with what you do next and make it better than it would have been if it hadn't gone wrong, as an improviser, and I do know how to do that.

My most powerful memory was hearing Earl Scruggs on 'The Beverly Hillbillies' as a 5 or 6 year old. That sound just blew me away, shook my head up.

I was a big fan of a writer named Jack Vance, a science fiction writer. He always wrote about these guys who were either going down a river in a strange world or would be in this one land where people acted really strange, and he'd have these interactions with them that were strange - he'd usually get run out of town or something. Then he'd end up in the next town over where the rules were totally different. And I love this stuff.

I first heard the banjo on the Beverly Hillbillies, and from then on I was banjo-conscious. But I didn't actually get one until my grandfather gave me one, almost by mistake. He knew I was playing a little bit of guitar. He saw a banjo at a flea market and bought it. I took it home with me and just never put it down. I was fifteen.