Different people need different things.

If I was any happier, you'd think I was on crack.

I am an incorrigible coffee geek. I make espresso.

I love music so much. It's like the one thing I'm good at.

The purists are small in number but, you know hardy of voice.

I celebrate three holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Telluride.

The greatest creators are as hungry to consume as they are to create.

Kill your television. Throw it out the darn window. Watch PBS in a bar.

Tradition matters. To me it's not a limiting force; it's a springboard.

There are two genres of music: there's good music and there's bad music.

I've performed in concert halls thousands and thousands of times in my life.

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

I really love how the andante from the "A minor Sonata" sounds on the mandolin.

My favorite bar in New York City is called Milk and Honey, a great cocktail bar.

The power of live music is vast. Live music is a wonderful way to spend some time.

My thesis statement would be—Bach didn't write Baroque music. He wrote great music.

I say if you're not obsessing about something, you might not be into it quite enough.

I would love to be one of those fellows who combine formal and folk music approaches.

Like a sporting event, live events are the one thing you can't have anytime you want them.

You go to the Grammys and you say, 'I don't care if I win or not,' and of course you care.

There is a certain immortality in the change that another person effects on another person.

I'd say playing with a group or playing solo are equally rewarding, but in a different way.

We love music, and when it's good we flip. And we want to get to the core of why it's good.

A cocktail and an oyster is an awfully good thing after a park, especially one close to water.

If you want to be happy, you listen to the music; if you want to be sad, you listen to the words.

I'm slow by nature; even if I write something fast, I'll let it sit for a month and hem and haw over it.

The more you look at great art of any kind, you'll see that there's this thread running through all of it.

For one, the whole concept of 'Live From Here' - writing a song every week - was like composition bootcamp.

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

No one wants to hear me doing my best Garrison Keillor... I think that he's inimitable; he's one in a billion.

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

I certainly love the bluegrass ensemble, I think it's a powerful tool, but I don't think it's more than a tool.

Presenting the American songbook as a living, breathing entity that's expanding all the time is very important.

Music should never be a dictatorship. It should be a symbiotic relationship between the musician and the audience.

I'm always excited about music, but having spent so much time in its pursuit - well, my musical life is complicated.

Coffee is pretty big in my life. It shows up in my lyrics a bunch, the same way the ocean does. It's a constant force.

The minute you make a record because you think somebody's going to play it on the radio is the minute you ought to quit.

My musical output has been consistently acoustic, but my taste has not. I love everything. As long as it's good, I'm in.

The world's music is at our fingertips, so if we like music, we kind of owe it to ourselves to check in with all of that.

The radio - this old piece of technology that's still crackingly current - gives you this communal experience in real time.

In my mind, there's this one 'super genre,' which is the only genre that matters, and that's the super genre of good music.

I think there's probably really wonderful music that has been lost due to the lack of preservation methods way back in the day.

I think people react so strongly to hearing the human voice, you can't give them too much of it or else they want it all the time.

It's important to allow people to affect you. If we kept that at the forefront of our minds, maybe we wouldn't be as divided as we are.

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.

Generally speaking, I think one has to take reviews with a grain of salt, unless you know who the person is and what their qualifications are.

Musicians and non-musicians alike are priding themselves on the width and breadth of their musical interests, which I think is to be encouraged.

I just want the opportunity to transcend my personal boundaries and the only way you can do that is by latching on to other people's coat-tails.

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.

When they invented the mandolin, it was as if they were trying to come up with the least efficient means of extracting noise from a piece of wood.

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