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.

We don't have any genre-based allegiances.

My life conforms to music, not the other way around.

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.

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

Really the greatest music I've ever heard I've hated the first time I heard it. It's been abrasive at first; it's been something that challenged me in a way that I wasn't fully comfortable with.

The great thing about jamming is that you come in with zero preconceptions. Someone might want to play something that suggests something else to you, and the next thing you know you're on a 20-minute adventure.

I think that we'll see the concept of 'genre' continue to die a slow and painful death.

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.

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.

Since I was little, I've always put a lot of pressure on myself.

I didn't have stage parents and sometimes I've envied people who did because I felt like, I guess, I'm compulsively worried I'm not accomplishing enough.

Everyone talks about how depressing Radiohead are. I don't hear it. They've created their own universe and it is dimly lit, but it's not inherently dark.

The great musics of the world are great for very similar structural reasons: good melody, good harmony, and a balance of feminine and masculine energy.

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

The darned thing about mandolins is they're really hard to turn up as loud as you would need to be to play with a drum set. They cease to sound like mandolins.

I play the mandolin, which people don't often expect great things from. But it has it's charms, and it's my voice. I feel like I had as little choice in the matter as I do my speaking and singing voice.

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

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

Hats off to musicians who just want a pure escape. I have a lot of fondness for pure escapism. I don't feel like it's irresponsible, I think sometimes you really need to take a breather.

Having small children, you start thinking about how everything in your life revolves around doing the best you can for this little being, trying to make a good life for that person.

You need to put yourself in the way of the music that stood the test of time. You're doing yourself an incredible disservice not be interested in the width and breadth of it.

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.

Ever since I became better acquainted with classical music, I've wanted to try my hand at longer forms, but I could never really see my way to it. And after I got divorced, all of a sudden I had a lot of pent-up energy and lots of stuff that had gone into trying to make this failing relationship work that kind of got reapplied.