...I'm so over the tattoos and the T-shirts and rings through the noses. It's not pretty, it's not pleasant, it's not exciting. Please stop it now.

It took a child. It took a child with a blood transfusion not only to wake me up, but to wake America up, basically. I mean, I read about his plight in a doctor's office in New York in a magazine. I was so outraged about it that I contacted the family. We became friends. I helped them move to another place in Indiana. And we became constant friends.

Well, I quit those days and my redneck ways.

We were both very much the same. We were both very impulsive. We both loved life. We both loved shopping. We both had a love of clothes, obviously, because he was the designer that I kind of wore forever and ever.

I'm going to fight for human rights, whether I do it silently behind the scenes or vocally so that I get locked up. I can't just sit back; it's not in my nature. I can't sit back and blindly ignore it, and I won't.

It's so easy to write songs about misery and hard times and sadness. It's much more difficult to write songs about happy and chirpy stuff.

I've got that resilient thing inside me. But I wasn't a happy bunny.