You’ve got quite a colorful sonic history, with a background spanning classical music, bluegrass, and indie rock. Could you name one thing you’ve learned from each of those genres that you’ve put to use in your current career as a solo artist?

From classical music I learned discipline. Intense, mind over matter, ninja level discipline. You can’t learn to be a good violin player without hours and hours of focused practice in the studio. It takes years of study before you even sound decent, and a mastery of the instrument takes an honest lifetime of study. I used to practice 3 hours per day plus rehearsals and lessons, as a minimum maintenance routine. In college, I’d be so exhausted from a full course load plus studio hours that I’d fall asleep in the practice rooms and the security guards would wake me and kick me out.

I’ve worked through sickness and physical pain. That toughness was bred into me by the violin. The discipline it took from me for 20+ years, all the way through college, gave me the focused determination it takes to be ok with writing songs by myself for hours and working on my own as a solo artist. Once I'm in the zone I don’t break focus.

Bluegrass music was the heart of my granddad Given’s family. He was my mothers’ father and my favorite person in the world. He had a bunch of brothers (8 I think?) and they would play barn dances all over Alabama when he was in his youth. They were a poor sharecropper family that moved around a lot. They relocated to Florida to pick fruit after the Great depression and brought music with them. These men were wizened and gray by the time I came along, but the family kept a weekend tradition of playing bluegrass music in the round out in my grandparents front yard in Eustis on many a weekend day. From the time I was small they’d shove me to the middle with my tiny violin and eventually I got the hang of following chord progressions by ear and I’d play along. By the time I was grown I could hang pretty well, although I don’t think I’ll ever be as fast a guitar picker as any of those guys were. So improvisation is a skill I learned from them that I use all the time.