I learned how to be more theatrical and have more fun, and to take a song and sing it over and over again in different ways, and make it different each time. I'm not just singing the song - it's this thing that's affecting me.

My family life, my adoption - it could be related to the songs, but I think the songs are deeper than that. They're not just about this experience.

I guess that in a lot of ways, my writing is more of a character to me than something that I feel personally attached to.

I don't know what folk music means anymore, because the meaning of that just keeps changing.

In the music industry, it's pretty easy to make an album just because you want to keep going, like, 'This is the formula.' But the formula is your life. You have to live your life and you have to live it well - that's the formula.

I know it sounds so lame, but the songs are like my children.

You want to create things as purely as possible without allowing the universe to interfere so much that it's manipulating it and making things unreal to you.