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The arts are the one thing that appeal right across all forms of politics, race, creed - everything.

The world is a complicated place, and there's a lot of division between people. The performing arts tend to unify people in a way nothing else does.

I think that what appeals to me in my work is having the opportunity to inhabit different genres and so to reach different audiences.

The way popular music is categorized and formatted cuts down on everyone's options. And although people don't talk about it, there are a lot of issues of race determining musical categories of what's rock, R&B, or even folk. It ends up restricting creativity.

Great music is great music. It doesn't matter what genre it belongs.

Music has no race. It appeals to everybody.

I think the problem with the arts in America is how unimportant it seems to be in our educational system.

Of all the arts, music is really the most abstract.

So many schools have cut the music classes out of their curriculum. We're trying to fill that gap by teaching the teachers how to educate the kids about their musical heritage.

Yeah, I can't separate the art from the music and the music from the art. I think that stems from going to school for film first, and kind of stumbling onto music as my career.