Bela Fleck Quotes

My most powerful memory was hearing Earl Scruggs on 'The Beverly Hillbillies' as a 5 or 6 year old. That sound just blew me away, shook my head up.

It doesn't have to be happy music to be inspiring.

I always try to work with people who are better than me, so I can learn more.

I think I'm getting better at being verbal. I used to have a lot of problems with it. I had my own little demons that I was fighting, and I used the banjo as an escape.

I think the Flecktones are a mixture of acoustic and electronic music with a lot of roots in folk and bluegrass as well as funk and jazz.

Sometimes you can fix something that went wrong with what you do next and make it better than it would have been if it hadn't gone wrong, as an improviser, and I do know how to do that.

Everybody should have a documentary made about themselves. It's amazing what you see and what you learn.

There's a lot of hip-hop that would be great with a banjo in it. It would just groove like crazy, and I hope I get to be one of the guys who does that, because it's coming. It's coming.

Being from New York, I wonder why am I inspired by bluegrass and Earl Scruggs? But when I look at the whole history of the banjo, I feel really good about it, including the Earl Scruggs part.

I learned that I'm so busy with what I'm doing, so focused on what I'm doing, that I miss a lot of opportunities for interacting with people.

I think the musical evolution I've gone through has come from all the work with the material.

I doubt anybody would have pushed me [on the music]. When I was at Sony nobody ever gave me any creative suggestions on the music.

When I play my own music, or when I play new music, there's much more stress and intensity of thinking about how I'm going to make it work!