I wanted to write songs which I think is a different thing. I wanted to write music that is informed by folk music. The chord progressions are obvious references.

I wasn't interested in writing music that wasn't beautiful for me to listen to.

I have a deep rooted folk sensibility that I can't get away from completely.

In high school, we studied a lot of poetical forms. I was really interested in the math that was involved and the strange live break ups. That gave me a great amount of respect for a rhymed stanza.

I give away CDs at shows if someone wants a CD but doesn't have any money. I wouldn't want to do that forever.

You should listen to a lot of different music.

I am consciously not trying to bring in World Music elements. The ways that I work and feel are completely different in how they sound than someone playing the Kora in Africa would play it.

I have a recording that I did of instrumental songs.

The very first Walnut Whales recording was recorded just a few weeks after I had started singing, out of the blue, started singing. And the voice, you can hear how uncomfortable I am with it, and how terrified I am with it.

I want to make music that somehow connects to the things that I love in America music.

Well, yeah, I wanted to resist the urge to thicken everything up with instrumentation, because I just felt like I was interested in seeing how the songs did on their own.

It's totally different. I usually don't tell people about the Pleased if they know me from the harp. And if they are there to see the Pleased, I usually don't tell them about the harp. I am nervous that these people will expect something similar.

I did spend a year in high school being obsessed with Fleetwood Mac.

I would happy for someone to download my music.

I can't play my songs on the smaller harp. I have a Celtic harp. I can't do the key changes.

I definitely don't subscribe to the theory that more instruments, or more vocal tracks, harmony, or double tracking the voice, is a good thing. People do their early albums very stripped down, then each album becomes bloated.

I am not doing something that it is experimental music in relation to classical music.

I am always trying to write.

People in San Francisco and the East Bay have shown interest, done interviews, and have come to shows. I guess that the news travels fast out of this island that we are on.

I started playing harp about fourteen years ago.

The way that words fit together is always interesting to me. I love words.

I recorded harp first or singing first. I recorded it all together. Part of the reason is that I don't know how to play the songs without also singing. I forget how they progress. I don't think that any of them are verse, chorus, verse, and so on. They are not simple.

I can understand someone not liking the voice or the songs.

Lyrics are very different. There is a clear line between that and a poem. Something that has been a source of great excitement and delight for me is this idea that I get to rhyme.

I have writing songs on my own for about six years.

I wanted to write songs which I think is a different thing. I wanted to write music that is informed by folk music. The chord progressions are obvious references.

I am producing sounds that people are not used to hearing from the harp.

It's valid that the Strokes and the Pleased have been influenced by some of the same bands. But it's invalid in the sense that we listen to the Strokes and try to sounds like them. I think that they are a good band.

I played piano for about two years when I was a kid. I didn't play long enough to be really great.

People are often afraid for me. They think that I am going to break. I can make it through a set.

I am consciously trying not to make it sound Celtic or African.

We were like psychedelic folk combined with Sonic Youth's noise.

I think my election is one of several indications that gay and lesbian folk are being brought more into the center of things. I'd like to think that my election signals my bringing of gay and lesbian folk into the center of the church.

Over and over again, financial experts and wonkish talking heads endeavor to explain these mysterious, 'toxic' financial instruments to us lay folk. Over and over, they ignobly fail, because we all know that no one understands credit default obligations and derivatives, except perhaps Mr. Buffett and the computers who created them.

The models for me were more the folk-rock singers of the '60s and '70s.

I think they do a great job on Queer as Folk.

You have to open your mind. I like the ability to express myself in a deep way. It's the closest music to our humanity - it's like a folk music that rises up out of a culture.

Real folk music long ago went to Nashville and left no known survivors.

I have a deep rooted folk sensibility that I can't get away from completely.

Civilization is a conspiracy. Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences.

My father being in the movie business, I thought being an actor would be great. But when I started singing to people in coffeehouses, you know, singing folk music and then, later, singing songs that I started to write myself, I felt more than an affinity for it.

I really understand what that process is all about and how important it is, especially with young folk and creative folk that love looking for some platform that makes it easier for them to express themselves.

The local music community here was dying for a place to record, so we started doing acoustic, folk and bluegrass and then did rock projects for other bands, as well as for my son Tal and my own work.

The novel is the first art form that is an honest-to-god commodity. That's what makes it different from both high art and folk art.

That folk music led to learning to play, and making things up led to what turns out to be the most lucrative part of the music business - writing, because you get paid every time that song gets played.

Why do we need to wait until somebody sells 10 million records to give people a show like that? What about us smaller, hungry folk? At least gimme a curtain!

But in my imagination this whole thing developed and I started mixing up old folk songs with the Beatles beat and taking them down to Greenwich Village and playing them for the people there.

All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song.

But the West did not last long enough. Its folk myths and heroes became stage properties of Hollywood before the poets had begun to get to work on them.