I'm basically a pretty shy person and I don't dance or get into fights. But there are all these things inside me that get out when I perform. It's like a real world when I play, here I can do all the things that I can't do in real life.

It's incredible how one song or even one little phrase or just a few notes, if you really concentrate on it, can be a kaleidoscope of possibility.

I can write the stuff and play it myself and have something in my head, but the best feeling is when somebody else plays it and they're hearing something other than what I'm hearing.

I feel so lucky that my high school was right in the middle of Denver, which is one of those sort of segregated towns, with black and white and Hispanic neighborhoods. But the school I went to was right in the middle of the whole thing.

I hate labels; the problem is that if you say you're one thing, it's hard for people to imagine you as something else. Music is way more complicated than that.

For me the music community was always like a model for what could be. The way people would play together, just harmony and being - old guys and young guys, black guys and white guys. It was setting an example for what the rest of us could be.

I've been lucky with the circle of people I'm playing with. We've played enough that there's a language we talk with each other when we play.