Just be yourself and everything will fall in line, the way it's supposed to be. If you're yourself, that's the best thing you can do, because you can never go "damn if I'd only been myself." Live an authentic life and you don't have to worry about your reputation.

Performance-wise, you really need to be down in the trenches; you need to do the hard work, for a lot of reasons: To build yourself as a performer, to get a sense of the audience, to work hard and to wonder, 'Do I really want to do this?'

I was in drama, wanted to be an actor.

A girl playing rock and roll, it's saying I own my sexuality and I'm going to tell you what I'm going to do. And I think people just find that threatening.

Aggressive, tough and defiant may describe me, but that leaves the impression I'm mean and I'm not. People expect me to have fangs.

A lot of people would say "well that's not a bad reputation. you sound like a pussy" and I would say yea. but I am passionate about music and being taken seriously about my music, so if you're going to mess with that, we have a problem.

Well before I was in a band, I wanted to be everything from a vet, an astronaut, an archeologist was a big one. It could be very wide-ranging because I had a lot of different interests including music so I'm very happy where I wound up.