Music took me from a real dark place to a real bright one.

My upbringing made me think that real legitimate music is written, not heard.

Music in general, but really musical theater has always been a real coping mechanism for me.

I want to bring real music back but make it marketable and mainstream. To me, real music isn't everything being synthesized, computerized.

I have so many opinions about everything it just comes out during my music. It's a battle for me. I try not to be preachy. That's a real danger.

Over the years, Cajun music has always calmed me down, or if I'm feeling real sick or feeling real unsettled, I can put that music on and try to get focused again.

I loved 'Fantasia' as a kid because it filled me with wonder, enchantment and awe. It was my first real introduction into classical music. It was totally inspiring to me.

I went to a music academy in Los Angeles, and some friends started playing me Ravel and Prokofiev, who I liked, but what really blew me away was 'The Rite of Spring.' That's what made me get interested in classical music for real and want to study it.

There is a reactionary conservative side of classical music, which is not the most exciting side of it. The side that draws me in, there's a real encouragement of risk-taking, going back to masters of that tradition like Beethoven and Bartok and Stravinsky.

To me, it's always a joy to create music no matter what it takes to actually get there. The real evils are always whatever stops you from doing that - like if your CPU is spiking and you have to sit there and bounce all your MIDI to audio. Now that's annoying!

My favorite music to sing would be my own songs, my original songs, just because I know them, you know I write the tunes, so my favorite songs are the newest ones that I write. That's what I like to sing the most, because it means something, it's real, it comes from me.

I think, until I was 16, classical music had just seemed like a little bit of a rhythmic wasteland for me. Coming from bluegrass, where one conducts oneself rhythmically, it seemed like such a different approach, and at that point the difference that I was noticing was a real turn off to me.

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