Musician

I think what people call genre is just a question of orchestration. So, for instance, with Punch Brothers, you look at that band and say that's a bluegrass band, when really it's an orchestration choice.

Calvin is a constant reminder that I'm not always as present as I want to be. His go-to state of being is present. So I'm really grateful of that part of being his parent.

I was two years old when I saw the mandolin for the first time, and I just loved it. I just loved the sound of it, the shape of it even, and the way it looks. And I still love it, which is a testament to something.

I love the string band. I love the sound of it, the possibilities of it, I love the physical sensation of creating and performing in it. It's my voice.

It seems like if they'd given Bob Dylan a pen and paper in the cradle that he would've come up with a great song. I'd love to write songs like that.

I'm a musician, and I feel like musicians owe it to themselves and owe it to music to concern themselves with as much of music as interests them. Even if you decide that you're never going to compose, you will be a better performer if you concern yourself with the craft of composition.

Growing up in a bluegrass or acoustic-oriented world, the musicians become so focused on performance, as far as playing. We tend to overanalyze the notes, so you're always trying to sharpen everything up.

I obviously love music very, very much.

I consider it a great honor to be part of the dissemination of hearable art.

To be able to rub shoulders with kids who have spent their entire lives studying the classics... that's something I need to improve my overview.

There's a lot of steps between there not being music and there being music. Composition is one part of that, but if no one performs it... It's like if a tree falls in the forest and no one's there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Improvising is writing, too - there was no music and now there's music. So that's composition. And any time you take any sort of a performance liberty, you're making a compositional choice. I don't know a serious performer who hasn't made compositional decisions, who hasn't engaged in the art of composition.

There's something about a variety show, I think, that disarms us as consumers of something. We're laughing, and there's this sense of anything goes, anything could happen.

I guess I am working pretty much all the time.

What makes one type of music classical and one bluegrass and one folk - these things aren't what's important.

For years, my actual listening activity has been governed by what I perceived to be good for me as a musician, almost like the way an athlete trains for a given sporting task. I'd listen to something if I felt it would improve my sense of harmony or counterpoint, or whatever I was working on.

Everything in our lives is encouraging us to turn inward with all the technology that we have available to us.

I'm just done downplaying how much I love Radiohead and how massive of an influence they are on what I do, because it's pretty obvious.

I can't listen to music while I'm doing something else. Well, unless I'm working out. But I, like, fall off the treadmill all the time if I'm listening to something that I like too much.

My folks were and are devoted public radio fans, who started listening to 'A Prairie Home Companion' in the 1980s; Garrison and Co. were the permanent headliners of their weekends.