If you enjoy learning, if you enjoy the curiosity of music and what can be done with it, and stop looking at it as something you have to do because someone says this is what you have to do to be a professional, you know, learn it because you're curious about it and then I think you'll have a much better creative sense and enable this inner voice to come out. These things are not taught and are not encouraged.

There's nothing that can prepare you for fame and for the music business at any point in history.

You just chip away until the puzzle is complete.

I don't really have that much control over where I play. I put out parameters and I accept what I can. If it's really low, or I had a bad experience at a place then I usually don't play there again.

Sometimes I feel like a one man crusade against the devaluation of music in America and culture in the arts.

There's things I'd like to do, but I've found that pretty much anything that I try to will to happen doesn't happen, but if you just kind of let go and let things fall into place, somehow I end up being able to do the right thing or the right time.

All of your experience comes into play when you're composing.