I've been devoted to Alison Krauss for many, many years.
Alison Krauss is definitely my favorite singer that's ever lived. I've never heard anyone like her.
I think Alison Krauss is one of the most amazing singers ever. As a songwriter - this is gonna sound cheesy - I love Randy Newman. And my mom passed on a love of Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. At one point I was so into the Indigo Girls, just like I was so into the Dixie Chicks, those female harmonies.
When I do listen to music, I'm more prone to listen to the people I've always listened to: George Jones, Otis Redding, Alison Krauss and Emmylou Harris.
There aren't that many female role models in science. There are a couple of women, but mostly you've got Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss - they're all guys. Bill Nye the Science Guy. I love that guy, but it's all guys.
I went to see Alison Krauss and Union Station at Disney Hall and I would say it was one of the most astonishing sonic experiences I have had. It's an enormous room that's acoustically perfect. My interpretation of receiving music as a layman is that the way the music kind of settled on me in that room was perfection.
Simplicity - that's what I want. It's been a rare commodity for me for a number of years, but I enjoy being able to hang out with my girl, read the newspaper, and sit back and start to read a book by someone I admire, like Lawrence Krauss or Christopher Hitchens. And that's it - simplicity, where the game of Hollywood doesn't exist.
Thor is magical, yes, but it is the magic of reality. His hammer was crafted 'in the heart of a dying star,' but so were you! Most of the atoms that make you up are in fact the innards of a ball of gas in space that got so heavy that it exploded. Stars died so that you could live, as physicist Lawrence Krauss would say.
I say that I suffer from what Rosalind Krauss was calling the post-medium condition, where an artist essentially employs several mediums in order to bring to life whatever specific ideas that they have. For me it's always been that way.
I think Alison Krauss and her band are the best today. The same goes for Rick Skaggs and his band.
