With the first kid, you micromanage it, making sure there's no hair out of place when it goes off to school. But by the third kid, it's more like, "Oh, you want to wear a splatter-painted, Hard Rock Café T-shirt for seven days in a row and not brush your hair? Go for it. Be who you want to be."

Music is kind of a strange business, and it's too weird of a job to have mean, conniving people around.

I don't even wanna say female guitar-players, just guitar-players, because music of all things doesn't need to be gendered and stratified, that's so boring.

I know that, physically, I'm a very demure-looking person. But I certainly have as much aggression or anger as the next person, and that's got to come out somehow. I'm lucky that I get to play music, and that it's not going to come out in some totally destructive way.

I wanted to give the songs a run for their money, to see if they stood on their own without a lot of accoutrements. It made more sense - and it was easier, too - to go out alone and see if these songs could get in a couple of fistfights and still be standing.

I'm first and foremost a guitar player. I've been playing since I was 12, which is over half of my life.

There's always something extremely personal in the songs, but I may change the point of view from what I actually experienced.