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.

You get to a certain age and it really occurs to you: "My mother and my father will not always be here. My spouse or my girlfriend or boyfriend are here right now, but someday they won't be." You realize that you need to like yourself.

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.

I listen to tapes a lot. I have a car that only (has a cassette player). I like the nostalgic factor.

In a lot of senses, things are definitely changing in my life, and with what's going on around me. But I still feel like the writing process is as intimate as it as before, if not more. Because I need my time more than I had before.

I was adopted legally around age three, but it's not like this thing I think about when I wake up every day. I was adopted by my foster parents, so I was comfortable with them. I wasn't in this alien place.