I've sung since I talked, when I'm two, but what I sang was ballads, because it's very hard to do a dance track with your little acoustic guitar when you're a kid.

I wrote poetry, which got me into lyrics. Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Elton John pulled me into pop. I started singing with a band - just for fun - when I was 17. And pretty soon, I was thinking I could sing pop in English as well as Spanish.

The Internet has been a blessing and a curse. The curse we know: A lot of people appropriating your intellectual property without paying for it. But I think it's important to realize the blessing of the Internet, which is that everybody has a voice and you can break through, even without a record company.

There are so many difficult things we're living through in the world today, so many horrible events, but we cannot let them stop us. No matter what happens, I feel you must move forward with optimism and not get totally sideswiped.

In Europe there's the upper crust, and these are long, historically families and social systems that have certain established rules that's harder to break into.

My mother had a beautiful, soothing voice that made me melt.

When I write a song it's always from the point of view: makes the song the best it can be.