I submitted videos and applications to talent agencies and TV shows; I drove to Vegas and visited agents. I was on 'America's Got Talent'; I played for free at venues in attempts to be 'found' and yet all the experts in the entertainment industry told me that what I did was not marketable and that I had to join a group or do more traditional music.

Can you imagine that Cuba and Europe's youth, who had forgotten about traditional music, who only thought of rock music, are now looking back towards their grandparents? That is a phenomenon.

First, it doesn't surprise me that traditional music has experienced a kind of exhaustion in the 20th century - not forgetting that many musicians started to look outside the traditional structures of tonality.

When Merle and I started out we called our music 'traditional plus,' meaning the traditional music of the Appalachian region plus whatever other styles we were in the mood to play.

When I discovered minimal music I felt I could create my vision - it was totally different to traditional music.

'Filk' is the folk music of the science fiction and fantasy community - you get parodies, you get traditional music that's had the words slightly modified, and you'll also get just original works that have been written about science fiction and fantasy works, or with science fiction and fantasy themes.

I didn't know folk music growing up, no. It's something I've come to study, really, because I think there's so much to learn from traditional music in the sense of the way music began as a way of communication, the traveling storyteller, the bard, the minstrels.

The music that I play and that I like is traditional music, maybe it's because of my age.

I love traditional music. But in any culture around the world, there is the historic and cultural music and everything that's been passed down and passed down, and hopefully you take that, and then you take it, you know, the next distance, and then somebody else takes it the next distance.

My Dublin wasn't the Dublin of sing-songs, traditional music, sense of history and place and community.

I felt a connection to the traditional music in all the pubs in Dublin that we stopped into.

Being a niche kind of artist, you're not going to make a lot of friends in the traditional music biz.

By the mid-'60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

Apart from Scottish traditional music, I wasn't really influenced by any kind of music. I just basically followed my own instincts.

I have been interested in Irish traditional music for the past few years.

I have observed, too, that the people of the many countries that I have visited are showing an ever increasing interest in the classical and traditional music of their own cultures.

I'd like to be remembered as a keeper of the flame who kept traditional music alive, because I've been doing that twice as long as I was in the Byrds.

Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.