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" My songs have a layer of melancholy. "

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" I can't help but do things my own way. "

" New Yorkers are historically tough crowds. "

" When we tour, there's always this unique quality to every town you visit... Touring, you get a sense of a collective identity for different cities. That's one of the things I love about my job. "

" Even on tour, where I perform songs from 'City Of Black And White,' I still do songs from 'Nothing Left To Lose.' I never turned my back on that material. On some albums, you change - that's all. The trick is to follow your heart and do what feels right. "

Black And White

" Being from Oregon, it's part of who I am. "

" There are people I love in Nashville and would not want to go a day without talking to, but I want to see the world. "

" I'm painfully a realist but ruthlessly an optimist. I think maybe it's because of my faith - I've always got the hope that there is something out there to make it all worthwhile. "

" I've never been one to learn scales and do exercises. Maybe I'm lazy, but I just don't take to that kind of thing. Learning other people's songs is enjoyable, and my fingers tend to go to new places because I'm not playing my music, the stuff that comes naturally to me. "

" I don't think, to be a traveler, you have to reject setting roots up. "

" I don't know how much I'm connected to the hip-hop scene, but I definitely lend from that urgency. "

" I played soccer. I was really known as an athlete. It was a shock to people that I was doing music. They thought it was really odd. "

" There's something incredibly vulnerable about middle school for me. We're really impressionable during that period. The cement's still wet, so to speak, and a lot of things later in life are born during that season. "

" The first record blew up and sold really well. 'City of Black & White' didn't sell as well, and that's when you wonder, 'Did I peak already?' "

" When I barely got into college, the one thing I could do was write, so I became an English major. "

" I'm a '90s music kid. "

" When I first started writing music, it was to express that. I was trying to find God and trying to find meaning in my life. That's what my music was about. It wasn't to entertain. "

" I was an English major, and I always wrote poems. "

" I started as a writer. I didn't play music until late in life. "

" God found me when I was at my lowest point. That was the first time in my life when I really felt like I understood who Jesus was - it was more than just knowing about Him: I felt like He met me in that time and place. "

" I love what I do. I love playing music. "

" There are a lot of great recording artists, like Jack White and Jack Johnson, who stay confined inside a very small box, but I'm more like Bon Iver, who recorded an album with programmed drums, and the next record was totally organic. I get that. "

" I think coming from the Northwest is something that's born in your blood. On my mom's side, I'm, like, a sixth-generation Oregonian. My family came over in the covered wagons, 'Oregon Trail'-video-game style. Maybe the pioneer mentality runs in my blood because they were all pioneers. "

" I think, in a lot of ways, hip-hop is interesting to me because it's like the modern-day folk music. "

" The criticism people could have of my music maybe is that it's somewhat schizophrenic at times. And if you don't like that, it could bother you. "

" I've always sought to get after something that's foundational in people. That comes through my faith, through my belief in life, through trying to hit something that's true every time. I think that's really where you move people, when you touch on something that's true, that's not based on fluff or based on a moment or a movement. "

" Golf was big in my family. "

" The first year I moved to Nashville, I started playing these songwriter nights with people like Nickel Creek, Duncan Sheik, and even Ryan Adams... That was the first place I really started playing music, and I had to really step up my game. Really quick. Or get kicked off the stage. "

" I don't spend afternoons practicing my guitar to get better. I do read, though, to get inspiration for my lyrics. "

" For my father, he didn't know what 'Grey's Anatomy' was. He didn't know who John Mayer was. But when I showed up on the 'Law & Order' TNT promo spot, he thought, 'Wow, my son has made it.' "

" When I was in college, I wanted to study film. My first passion was to be a cinematographer. So maybe there's something innate in my music where it partners well with images. "