I love my wife and I know she loves me. We're best friends. We're just lucky to have found each other. It takes a lot of work but I just feel very blessed that I found the right person. It's a very fortunate situation and not everyone has that.

My mom and I were super tight. I think she really wanted me to be an artist, you know? She used to like to tell people she wanted to be Beethoven's mother. That was her thing. She wanted to be the mother of this person.

Life is really like that: there are certain things that are wonderful and certain things that are not so wonderful and what you are going to do about it. With grace and with dignity, move through them. Deal with them.

You basically have to play everything (in New Orleans), because you're getting calls to play gigs of all different styles, from classical to R&B to funk; modern jazz to traditional jazz.

I've been all over the world. I love New York, I love Paris, San Francisco, so many places. But there's no place like New Orleans. It's got the best food. It's got the best music. It's got the best people. It's got the most fun stuff to do.

Live theater is just an incredibly powerful medium, and I think anyone who goes, whether they know about it or not, if they see something that sort of fits with them, it's kind of hard to deny that they had a good time.

Not everybody gets to record with an orchestra, and not everybody that gets to record with an orchestra gets to write all their own stuff.