Leo Kottke

“You can't really tell what the audience wants but you can tell what will keep everybodies attention in the same place.”

“It was a kind of paralysis you would get from tendonitis and I would last about five to ten minutes into the set and it would set in and I really couldn't play.”

“I would say that if you don't feel like talking to the crowd something is wrong and if you force yourself to talk to them things will happen and to that extent things aren't choreographed.”

“I think if you are writing an instrumental you are dealing with more of an aesthetic in a sense but a lyric is more of a putting yourself on the line and a much more expensive exercise.”

“Yeah, the first thing that comes to mind is not to try too hard.”

“It depends on the time of the year and who I've been talking to, I try to put people in the studio I like.”

“The bulk of my set is instrumental and you have to give yourself and the audience some relief because a performance is not about great guitar playing it's really about entertainment.”

“I seem to find different material every four to six months and I frequently forget it which is a shame because it would be nice to have a bigger library.”

“We had a day off here yesterday and I just sat in my room and played.”

“We spent a lot of time on that record with the sound and recorded it on the Paramount sound stage which is this huge room where the sound is reflected but the reflection is so late and comes from so far away that it doesn't blur the music but gives you a room nonetheless.”

“The principle element in a performance is risk, and if you're losing interest then by scaring yourself to death the audience will feel it and boy it'll wake them up.”

“I'm not subject to their rise and fall because I'm not accepted by them, so I have my own little curve going on. A lot of it is because of how much I play, I think I connect like when all you had was Vaudeville, I think I have an audience by performing a lot!”