When I was a junior in college I moved to New York and went to this performance school the Experimental Theatre Wing. We had singing class and again, some of the other students would cry when I was singing, and I really didn't know why. I started to realize that there was something in the tone of my voice that was evocative for them.

When I was a junior in college I moved to New York and went to this performance school the Experimental Theatre Wing. We had singing class and again, some of the other students would cry when I was singing, and I really didn't know why. I started to realize that there was something in the tone of my voice that was evocative for them.

You need to release yourself of any expectation of what that material should be. Just start letting it be what it's naturally evolving into, even if it means just pulling words out of the dictionary and laying them one after another. Words are everywhere.

The creative process is just a process and you can't really separate it from life. Growing your hair is a creative process. Your body is creating hair. Being alive is a creative process. Whether it's growing something in the garden or growing a song, the material accumulates. It's the process of being alive; it's the passage of time. Things change.

No matter how public your work is, it's just a relationship with yourself. And you have to create a little sacred space inside yourself to treasure that... because when you die, that's still what you have. It's what you're born with and what you leave with. It's kind of a story of the way you accompanied yourself through your life.

Any woman who says she's not a feminist is just someone who's afraid of being penalised for saying she wants to advocate for women.

I was about 17 or 18 when I first started performing in public. I had a teacher when I was a freshman in college and she came up to me afterwards and said she had been crying while I had been singing, and it really shocked me.