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One of the world’s foremost fingerstyle guitarists and harp-guitarists. Her new project is an international cookbook with a CD containing a tune for each recipe. She has released more than a dozen instrumental CDs and eight instructional DVDs and has also published articles in numerous guitar magazines. Her YouTube channel has gotten approximately 1.2 million views. She is also the founder of the Music for Life Alliance charity.

Notable Guest Quotes

"The people we met and the relationships that were made over meals and over music, playing music around the fire as well, that's where the lasting memories came from and that's where the inspiration comes from for the music as well."

"The next thing I'm going to do is recipe book number two and see if I can get involved with Indian music.  I've never really explored Indian music and I don't really understand it so there's a big project ahead of me there because I have to do it because I love Indian food."

"I've already written a tune in a very Japanese style... That's the other one; the tune is already written, so now I've got to explore the cuisine.  So, it forces me to explore either the cuisine or the music of different areas."

"So, very funny video, a black and white film, and I thought, 'You know, this black and white film needs its own music,' and so I wrote something in the style of that era, that ragtime, old ragtime era, style piece, and I have that with the tuba player and trombone player on the record."

"I wanted to kind of, in a way, harken back to the time where you had the LPs and the visual of the cover, the stories inside, listening to the music from cover to cover, that was a whole experience.  And I wanted to have something more tactile, a different way to expand the experience of a CD.  And so I figured if I embedded LEDs in there, and in this case we used fiber optics, then you'd have a little experience."

"I would really rather spend my time writing music and making music than tweeting and that sort of thing."

"For me it has to be special to put it (on social media).  I don't just want to keep putting up things constantly.  If I want to share something I want it to be something that will improve the quality of somebody's life, to put it up there."

"A big thing is to stay inspired and I find that I have to keep pushing myself and learning new things and going in different directions to keep that spark alive."

"To take those notes and shape them and - if I'm writing or arranging a tune - I listen to where the melody wants to go and where the middle voice wants to go and where the bass wants to go and I follow it and I'm in service of the music and I let the music write itself.  And then every now and then I'll tell the music to take a left turn where it wants to take a right turn and I'll trick it and... have a little bit of humor with my songwriting partner, which is the music itself."

Songs on this episode