I lived by a bay for a while, and I shucked oysters. Some packing things. You know, just whatever odd job you can find whenever you're moving around. I never really cared much for the franchise kind of work, so I'd try to find things that I considered to be a little more honorable.

I play popular songs. This is not some obscure, unusual music. This is popular music.

I just started playing music on the street and walking around with a fiddle, and I think that's kind of when I started being serious - or as serious as it's going to get.

Essentially any history we have is just a history of aristocrats. We don't have any history of people.

I wouldn't consider myself a songwriter at all. Maybe I piece together a certain little thing here and there, but songwriters are people who do this with sheet music.

You have a history of art-music that you equate with music. That's what I love about that term art-music. It separates itself from music-music, the music people have always made.

The history of music is nothing more than the history of art-music or classical music, the music that was commissioned by aristocrats.