Leo Kottke

I will literally open my mouth not knowing what is coming out.

Yeah I do and I don't mind, in fact that is one of the real encouraging things about this whole career of mine is that there are tunes I wrote almost thirty years ago that I will still play in front of an audience and I still like the old tunes.

I am evidence that you don't have to sell a lot of records or succeed in the usual way to have a big audience and a job.

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.

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

There are nights when you can feel stale because you've fallen into a pattern by touring too much, but it's easy to get out of it by deliberately getting in trouble and playing yourself into a corner to then see if you can get out of it.

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.

I do have a library of events I can talk about and I always expect to find a different point of view on it so even if I talk about the same event in the same town it's fresh.

It was almost two years after I left Capital that I put out the first one on Chrysalis and that was really instructive because it was no better in particular than any other record I'd done.

I have always thought of myself as a performer first and way down the line as a recording artist.

The first music I was exposed to was Stravinsky and I loved it but I don't remember it.

I was taking a nose dive somewhere between eleven and twelve because my sister had died and I was practicing something that siblings do which is follow in their footsteps and die as well.