After 40 years of recording acoustic music, it is not very often that a new band catches – and keeps – my attention, ... Old School Freight Train has done that and more.

I love playing all kinds of music, ... And the way to learn that music is with the musicians who invented that style. It's hard to write a style--you need to absorb it.

This music is very eclectic, ... It's tough to find musicians who are experts in 15 different styles.

He was a musical giant,

I wanted people to know it wasn't bluegrass, ... That had been my reputation up to that point and I didn't want to mislead people.

I had grown up on Folkway's Nonesuch field recordings and the stuff Lomax had done for the Library of Congress, but the production values on the Ocora releases were on a whole other level. Eno and I realized that music from elsewhere didn't need to sound distant, scratchy, or 'primitive.' These recordings were as well produced as any contemporary recordings in any genre. You were made to feel, for example, that this music wasn't a ghostly remnant form some lost culture, soon to be relegated to the almost forgotten past. It was vital, and it was happening right now. To us there was strange beauty there, deep passion, and the compositions often operated by rules and structures that were radically different from what we were used to. As a result, our limited ideas of what constituted music were exploded forever. These recordings opened up myriad ways that music could be made and organized. There were many musical universes out there, and we had been blinkered by confining ourselves to only one.