Quotes from Chris Thile

The world's music is at our fingertips, so if we like music, we kind of owe it to ourselves to check in with all of that.

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

Improvisation is an important part of bluegrass, and I would hasten to add that classical music wasn't always such an improvisational void. Back in the day, everyone's cadenzas were improvised, and improvisation was taught in conservatories.

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.

I've performed in concert halls thousands and thousands of times in my life.

I'm a musician, and I feel like musicians owe it to themselves and owe it to music to concern themselves with as much of music as interests them. Even if you decide that you're never going to compose, you will be a better performer if you concern yourself with the craft of composition.

Improvising is writing, too - there was no music and now there's music. So that's composition. And any time you take any sort of a performance liberty, you're making a compositional choice. I don't know a serious performer who hasn't made compositional decisions, who hasn't engaged in the art of composition.

No one wants to hear me doing my best Garrison Keillor... I think that he's inimitable; he's one in a billion.

Musicians and non-musicians alike are priding themselves on the width and breadth of their musical interests, which I think is to be encouraged.

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.

The goal of serious musicians is to play outside of yourself. That's most likely with people who suggest things that are outside your musical experience.

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.

It was kind of sort of the heavens opened up and I realized that Bach, at least, you know - out of all the classical music - needs to be a big part of my life.

My thesis statement would be—Bach didn't write Baroque music. He wrote great music.

A cocktail and an oyster is an awfully good thing after a park, especially one close to water.

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

Music should never be a dictatorship. It should be a symbiotic relationship between the musician and the audience.

The constructive criticism that I take very seriously is from people I know and respect, and they don't have to be musicians. But I do have to know where they're coming from.

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.

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.

People who are happy with their neighborhoods in New York always say the same thing: 'It's such a neighborhood!' And that's how we feel about Carroll Gardens. We see all the same people who have been there a long time and are very friendly and welcoming to us.

Presenting the American songbook as a living, breathing entity that's expanding all the time is very important.

I think there's probably really wonderful music that has been lost due to the lack of preservation methods way back in the day.

Different people need different things.