"When Jim told me to take not just a week off, but weeks off from playing last year, I was terrified. I had never done that before. Of course I had taken some time off before, but once I extended it to a point where it was uncomfortable I think it was good because I started hitting the fresh points where my instrument became new again. I threw away all of those “bad habits” that we all have, and once I went back to it, I learned how to play my instrument again in such a healthy way, rather than trying to force myself to stop all of my bad habits. Sometimes we just need more time to recover, and people are really uncomfortable with that. People think that they’re not going to be able to get their sound they had back. Of course you will get it back. I mean how many years have we all been playing, you don’t just lose that. But, it’s OK to be uncomfortable-you just have to stay with it."

"For me most of my struggles have just been managing time and learning how to say, “no”. I’m still not very good at that. There’s so many things where I want to help lots of people with lots of different things. It’s difficult for me to prioritize and make sure that I remember that I’m here for composition and I want to compose first. It’s hard though, because I still need to make money and buy groceries and pay rent, so it’s just balancing everything. It’s just an ongoing thing, trying to figure out how much time I should spend on each thing. I don’t think it’ll ever get easier either, I think it’ll actually get harder."

"I’ve really had a love/hate relationship with the tuba, but the moment that had me keep going, you were actually there. It was in Tianjin. Remember when we had such a long day, but we couldn’t go anywhere because we were just being bombarded by people who wanted to take pictures and get our autographs? There was this little kid who was around 9 or 10, which was the age I was when I started Tuba, but he was so afraid to speak to me. So his mom, in her best English was trying to say, ‘he loves the tuba and he loved watching you!’ It felt like I was passing down a tradition, and passing all those feelings I got when I was little, to this little boy. I was unintentionally paying it forward. That’s kind of been keeping me moving forward because it’s hard to get inspired from an instrument like the tuba. But man, other people are the best way to get inspired, for sure."

"I think the biggest thing, and people do not say it, is that you are never really OK. There will always be something. The terrible and wonderful thing about music is that the minute that any type of song comes on, and you happen to hear one sentence, it could just trigger 100% of your grieving or whatever. But then, after you have this little cry session, you realize how amazing you feel. I think everyone who has been through losing someone, especially losing someone who is close to them, you learn to cope throughout the years, and you learn different ways to move on, but there will ALWAYS be a part of you that is completely gone. It’s just never something that you can get over, no matter how old you are, and I think people try to pretend that you can."

"A lot of times you’ll get inspired, and you’ll get motivated and you want to try something, but then you realize that you can’t do it, and you think, ‘what am I doing?’ and then you give up. It’s so easy to give up. It’s kind of trite to say, ‘oh, don’t give up! keep trying!’, but I think it’s ok to say, ‘try it in a different way.’ It relates to when I joined the soccer team in high school. I wanted to be the forward and make all the goals and score all the points, but I didn’t have the skills to do that and I wound up being put in a defensive position. But it turned out that my aggressiveness was more useful on defense and the role that I was initially wanting to have was not the right one for me. So obviously everything doesn't go just as you'd expect--take a grain of optimism instead of just a grain of salt would be a good way to look at life. Things will always work out"