I think that sonically, music speaks volumes more than words do, and I have always thought that and will continue to think that for the rest of my life.

It was funny to just take a backseat and be like, 'Wow, I might be in this crazy place, but maybe I don't need to understand everything, maybe I don't need to be someone else.'

The more I know, the more I realise I don't know. And the more I realise I'll never truly understand.

You always know when a real inspiration is behind the melody, arrangements, even lyrics. And I know that's really vague, but it's true.

Raucous drunken trumpets and instrumentation tend to guide the way you think. They can give you a path to follow lyrically.

As a teenager and a young adult, I never felt like my own story was interesting enough to tell, so I always wrote lyrics from someone else's perspective - told someone else's story.

My dad is obsessed with music, so I was raised around this guitar player that really wanted me to be a guitar player.

I'm sure that's every adolescent's complaint about their home town. When a city is unstimulating, you get pretty isolated.

I want a song that raises the hair on the back of my neck when I sing it live and I want to feel it every time.

I feel like I've met most people I look up to musically. I just want to meet Chef.

I could probably spend the next five years reworking an album from ten years ago, if given the chance, to make it better - make it best, so to speak.

What I must do is all that concerns me,

Sophisticating meat eating doesn't make it any less savage.

One of my earliest memories is of my father carrying me in one arm with a picket sign in the other.

I wanted to use some kind of name so people would know where I was from. So I took the name "bluegrass." There is not a prettier name in the whole world.

My greatest thrill? That's easy. It came the day Mr. McGraw named his 20 all-time players. I'm ninth on that list and that is thrill enough to last me a lifetime.

In the assumption that power belongs as a matter of course to capital, all economists are Marxians.

I'm not a big birthday guy; I never have been.

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

You can say I'm not the easiest architect in the world, because I'm always trying to push the limits.

It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.