When you read enough stories about people who have been through different levels of trauma, and it doesn't matter what the history is, trauma is trauma, there's always this freeing of the spirit.

Listening to the birds tells you different things about a place. I heard bird sounds I'd never heard before. I heard street sounds and country sounds and city sounds that are very different from what it is I'm used to and I get very fascinated about how that marks a place.

When you read enough stories about people who have been through different levels of trauma, and it doesn't matter what the history is, trauma is trauma, there's always this freeing of the spirit.

It's nice that people can call me an artist and it's nice that I can refer to myself as such, but it also kind of separates me from the common man in a way that I don't wish to be, so craftsperson makes me feel a bit more connected.

I'm a history geek and I love American history. It's so bizarre and so problematic and I love the many conundrums that it represents. You can go down so many black holes.

I love making people sing. I love group singing, sacred harp singing, choral singing, recordings of people singing sea shanties, work songs, prison songs - how people just sang to get through things.

The saxophone was created to mimic the human voice and I think that's why I gravitated toward the saxophone eventually. I'd loved the clarinet, but there's something about the saxophone that just grabs you.