Japan and Europe seem to have a little more cultural education and so the crowds have been a little more big and enthusiastic, and the places I've played seem a little more classy.

I'm happy doing what I do. That's ok. Some guy could appear tomorrow and do it much better than me, and so be it, but right now I'm just happy to be who I am doing what I do.

You stick your nose in the dirt until you find something that smells good.

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

I'm not a haiku artist, but I wanted to use the phrase 5, 7, 5 in the melody that flows over time. So the string melody, the first one is five notes, the next one is seven, and then the third one is five.

I had been composing just for myself, and people would say I played so orchestrally, and wondered if I thought about having someone write a piece for me for an orchestra. And I thought, I don't want someone else to write that. You know I finally had made an overhead chart of my drums and what pitches the cymbals and toms were tuned to, and what have you. And I started to compose just with what I had for my solo drumming.

I don't think I really started to seriously compose until around that time when I was 40.