When I was first starting out, I drove myself around the country in my Honda Civic, playing anywhere that would have me. This is a chance to strip the songs down to their roots and let the audience hear them the way I write them.

I don't need to get paid. I just wanna open. I just wanna get in front of new people.

I'm sort of a traditionalist usually. I love old soul music and The Beatles; I realized I was sort of trying to make music sometimes that fit into an era that's gone.

I think the biggest thing is that I have fun with the fans on Twitter and Instagram and at the show. It's a fun time to be able to communicate with all the different types of social media stuff.

I started taking piano lessons when I was 8 and I wrote my first song shortly after. Music was really important in my family. My grandma was a professional violin player and my parents first met when my dad was giving my mom guitar lessons.

I was raised really strongly on The Beatles; they were huge in my family, my parents loved them, and they used to quiz me on who was singing which song, and we'd play certain records for certain events, and things like that. So I mean, they were sort of my introduction to pop music.

To me, there are 3 parts of the album process: writing, recording, and my favorite part: getting to sing the songs with the fans every night.