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.

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

I really think kids should understand that music is like learning the alphabet. You put small letters together to make words, and then you use these words to create a story, but with music. And they really need to know how to mix and match those letters and how to come up with something that is really interesting, or speak in metaphors as poets do to show us something maybe we didn't think about.

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

The way we teach is a very linear kind of way.

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.

We have a society that wants somebody to come out of college with a degree that will make them a slave for whatever discipline they're in.