When I did the video for "Piledriver Waltz," I was thinking about rodeo clowns, and how they're risking their lives just to keep an entire arena laughing. They're in danger!

Growing up in Nashville, especially in a music business family, means growing up with knowledge that seems like common sense until later in life when you realize people spend thousands of dollars a semester trying to learn or pretending to learn while looking for some intern job on music row.

It was so strange, coming from Nashville, Tennessee, where I was playing to 15 people, to going to London and playing in this crowded little dive pub. I know Tom Petty had a similar thing - I realize, on a lot larger scale.

Words are very much my thing. I'm very picky and choosy with them. So, I kind of edit myself to the point of, almost stumping myself, sometimes.

I have this friend who has a theory that lots of towns have energies. And, for instance, certain places in Alabama have bad ones because they were built on reservations or built on cemeteries or something. But Nashville has a really gravitational, magnetic pull.

I only performed a song so I could not write an essay. I just enjoyed being around bands, and around musicians, and, I didn't want to be the girl who followed the band around. I love singing, I love performing, but it's never been this goal.

Anyway, this huge Lena Dunham interview in Playboy. It felt like a shifting, of some kind. This new female archetype - this new, powerful, honest, non-pandering kind of female is becoming more powerful than whatever else has been rocking it for the past 10 years. I heard that Hugh Hefner's daughter is taking over. Which, if a woman is running Playboy, something is right.