I wasn't popular in school, I was Mexican, I was all these inappropriate things. I started playing the ukulele and taking it to school, and I realized people liked listening to it. I would play it to comfort myself at home, and I'd play rhythm and blues songs that had four chords. That's how it started.

In this society, we don't like to face the future and the dying process and all of it. Most of us really don't want to think about it, but it's facing me in the mirror every day.

Noise is an imposition on sanity, and we live in very noisy times.

People say I'm such a pessimist, but I always was. It never stopped me from doing what I had to do. I would say I'm a realist.

I wish it was clear for me how it happened [stop writing songs], then maybe I could start writing again. But it's kind of an "it." It just submerged itself. Because the way I had always written was just that it came out. It just happened.

You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now.

I love the lower ranges of my new voice. I really enjoy that. It's a challenge, and I accept the challenge. I sort of enjoy it now to reach notes that maybe four years ago I couldn't reach. I don't mean to grumble about it. I'm past that critical period and have gone on to a whole new field. And we go everywhere. We travel around the world, and I learn songs from every place we go, and it's a joyful process.