When I was about five or seven years old my mother was placed in a mental institution and so we were with our father who worked very hard, and we had to figure a lot of things out.

You cannot get an A if you're afraid of getting an F.

Making a record is like painting a school bus with a toothbrush

I got a scholarship to Seattle University and I was writing arrangements for singers and everybody. But the music course was too dry and I really wanted to get away from home.

I got in the school band and the school choir. It all hit me like a ton of bricks, everything just came out. I played percussion for a while, and stayed after school forever just tinkering around with different things, the clarinets and the violins.

They say a blind hog will find the acorn one day.

I started imagining this whole different world. It was a society of musicians, a family I hoped I could belong to one day.