A musician's attempt to summarize his or her work leads to all this prescriptive chatter, or what I call the Modifier's Madness. A lot of adjectives working overtime.

I think of the saddest thing I can and then add a sick dog to that. If I think of a sick dog from the beginning, I just stop there.

Life is all about toiling and labor. But obviously I get great joy in confronting challenge and taking risk.

I’ve never known a man who loved me.

The round-up is an aggressive tradition. I'm trying to objectively be a steward of the tradition and what it means in its choreography.

I think musicians should stay off television generally. I get asked all the time. Those shows are just promoting insipid comedies. Who watches those shows? And whoever does I don't think my music would speak to those people. I don't even want those people to hear what I'm doing.

I'm no longer beholden to the sacredness of the recorded song as some kind of ultimate standard by which every performance of the song is measured. I like to diversify, that there are multiple versions of every song. And the songs incorporate a lot of improvisation, and an element of chance, and I think that's exciting. There's no one true formulation of a song, they have various manifestations depending on the space we're in. I like that.