In performance, we have a greater purpose. The greater purpose is that we're communing together, and we want this moment to be really special for all of us. Because otherwise, why bother to have come at all? It's not about proving anything. It's about sharing something.

When people ask me how they should approach performance, I always tell them the professional musician should aspire to the state of the beginner.

What came up at age 49 is I realized that of all the things I'm interested in, the thing I'm most interested in is figuring out what makes people tick, why people think the way they do, why they act the way they do. And I realized that music is such a great way to investigate why people do what they do.

People will ask, 'Are you famous?' And I always answer, 'My mother thinks so.'

Music is one of the ways we can achieve a kind of shorthand to understand each other.

I really would like to be involved in things and to understand things, and in some ways you've got to be careful what you wish for because I feel very, very blessed to have such an interesting life and to be able to have little snapshots of lives of people from many different parts of the world.

Music is powered by ideas. If you don't have clarity of ideas, you're just communicating sheer sound.