Abigail Washburn Music Quotations

I'm no ethnomusicologist. There is a connection between the five-note scale used both in traditional Chinese music and the blues, but I don't really understand it. All I know is, whenever I play with Chinese musicians, we seem to belong to the same musical gene pool.

For most Americans, my Chinese music feels like a novelty and it's not what it is for me,

I really believe in the power of music.

For most Americans, my Chinese music feels like a novelty, and it's not what it is for me.

My parents played the radio, but music was never an obsession or something that I thought I could call a career.

I believe in music because it has the power of change.

I feel like my kind of music is a big pot of different spices. It's a soup with all kinds of ingredients in it.

My whole drive is to make sure that music is a common space where we search for beauty and share it. It needs to be louder than any conversation. That's where we have to go as a human race.

I had no intention of becoming a performer, and yet under miraculous circumstances I was brought into the music industry fold. If divine powers hadn't intervened, I'd still be living in China working in some area of Sino-American comparative law.

I do see music as complete refuge. It's a universal home, complete common ground between everyone; it comes from a place that has no nation and no boundaries around it.

I've moved around so much my whole life, and I've gotten so used to being the Other in situations - the foreigner, the outsider. The first time I've ever felt like there was no separation between me and the other elements was in music.

You can enjoy many different types of music. I think that's something more Americans should think about.

In some ways, my most comfortable feeling has been that of being an outsider coming in, but over the years I've tired of that and I'm ready to feel at home. That's what music gives me: a feeling of absolute home.