A good espresso to me is a little bit salty; you just become used to a good taste. Anytime I go into a new place and they don't clean their machine p….

I create little challenges for myself, like, 'Okay, whatever you do in this song, you've got to somehow work in Greek Cypriots,' or something like th….

There is something comforting about going into a practice room, putting your sheet music on a stand and playing Bach over and over again..

Guitars are kind of just, you know, sexy, especially old vintage ones..

If you take a little time, let's say three weeks off, after recording a song, and you listen to it every other day, you're just going to know eventua….

The real drag is trying to fly from country to country, day of show, with all your gear. You get hassled all the time. It's hard trying to keep it to….

Pretty much any given day, barring some major distraction, I get melodies coming to me. Lyrics don't come quite as easily. So I've been inventing lit….

I think jazz was just seeking respect and validity because a lot of people didn't believe it was a viable art form, and then they got a lot of attent….

Songwriting requires some sort of ceremony to even get the process started, and it can be somewhat arbitrary..

The problem is, when you're working with orchestras, you only get the orchestra for about two hours before the performance to pull it all together, a….

What you see with your eyes when you're making music is going to have a profound effect on what you hear..

Some of your best songs come from a desperate attempt to escape, so sitting in an airport for hours I can just start pulling out little fragments of ….

Every time I make a record, it's kind of like scarification or something. You work 15 hours until you're stupid. You're just kind of all jittery..

The orchestra's an amazing instrument, but I don't want to just arrange my songs for it. I think that might be kind of boring and a little bit overdr….

All the folks I play with come from jazz backgrounds or at least appreciate spontaneity within the parameters of a pop song..

I'm just trying to get my body in shape so that I can handle it. It's a very physically demanding thing. I've been doing it for 16 years, so I know w….

I definitely have to give myself permission, like on "Master Swarm," to rip a lead on that. Just play a violin solo that's - it's a bit showoff-y, bu….

I'm coming from a place that's more experimental and indulgent already, so for the last 10 years, it's been more like, "How can I defend my own sensi….

I think when I was pretty young I got really into the tone of my instrument and I remember just playing one note for an hour to just kind of feel the….

Anyway, I'm digressing, but this is just kind of this 10-and-a-half-minute, ambient - you hear cicadas and birds and the wind outside and crickets as….

Honestly, I didn't have the patience for biology or history in an academic sense, but I always liked the kind of big questions..