A Quote by Chris Thile

For years, my actual listening activity has been governed by what I perceived to be good for me as a musician, almost like the way an athlete trains for a given sporting task. I'd listen to something if I felt it would improve my sense of harmony or counterpoint, or whatever I was working on.
There was a point where if you had told me I was going to be a national morning anchor, I would probably have been terrified. But now, I feel prepared. I've been in the business for almost 20 years now. I'm almost forty years old and I've been doing this for a long time, so I felt like, "Okay, I'm ready to do this."
I have been known for almost 30 years to sort of do whatever comes my way. It's always been touch-and-go after each job finishes. I just like to be working.
my life has been wonderful. I have done what I felt like. I was given courage and I was given adventure and that has carried me along. And then also a sense of humor and a little bit of common sense. It has been a very rich life.
I'm a musician and I listen to music all the time. If there's something out there where someone would tell me that I should listen to, I would listen to it.
For so long, it was just my secret. It burned inside me, and I felt like I was carrying something important, something that made me who I was and made me different from everybody else. I took it with me everywhere, and there was never a moment when I wasn't aware of it. It was like I was totally awake, like I could feel every nerve ending in my body. Sometimes my skin would almost hurt from the force of it, that's how strong it was. Like my whole body was buzzing or something. I felt almost, I don't know, noble, like a medieval knight or something, carrying this secret love around with me.
I feel great that I've been given a chance in the golden years of my life. To me, it's the last battle, and I've been given a chance to get stuck in some good armament, some good power, and there's a chance that now I can finish off my working years with my head held high.
I love jazz. So to me, there are two main types of jazz. There's dancing jazz, and then there's listening jazz. Listening jazz is like Thelonius Monk or John Coltrane, where it's a listening experience. So that's what I like; I like to make stuff that you listen to. It's not really meant to get you up; it's meant to get your mind focused. That's why you sit and listen to jazz. You dance to big band or whatever, but for the most part, you sit and listen to jazz. I think it comes from that aesthetic, trying to take that jazz listening experience and put it on hip-hop.
I think my playing has been orchestral throughout the years, and this is another way of expressing that. But I primarily see it as the ultimate accomplishment of a musician. Composing makes me feel like I've finally gotten all the way up the ladder as a musician.
My father's NFL dreams never really felt like motivation to me, but it was something to aspire to. He was such a great athlete, the least I could do is try and use my athletic talent to represent my country in a different way. He represented as a Marine. Maybe I could do something to represent as an athlete.
I had a very humane, what the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova would probably have called 'vegetarian,' experience of migration. It involved planes and trains - the actual compartments of passenger trains - and not grueling walking and riding on the roofs of trains.
Listening. That's what music is about. You hear it. And I'd listen to it and something would move me one way or another; and I would try and play it.
I awaken in the morning with confidence, rejoicing in whatever work is given to me to do. Whatever that work is, I do it, not in order to earn a living or in a sense of performing an onerous duty; but, with joy and gladness, I let it unfold as the activity of God's expression through me.
I was loving being the champion, and I wasn't listening to my body. I almost felt like I was untouchable in a way - that I could just keep going and everything would be OK.
It's almost an impossible task to sum up all the things my parents have taught me over the years. Whether it was how to tie my shoelaces or encouragement in whatever career choice I wanted to pursue, they have both always been there to support me.
The idea that music is art has been something we advocated for years. And yet it doesn't receive the same treatment as art in the sense of the value of what it is, especially nowadays when it's been devalued and diminished to almost the point that it has to be given away for free.
I've had down periods in the past few years where I haven't been writing or working on music, and during that time something always felt like it was missing, but when I bring it back into the equation, everything in my life makes sense again. As corny as that sounds.
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