I try to use pain as fuel for my work.

How long have you been sitting in the darkness? You forget. You know you're getting hard to be with and you're crying every time you turn around. Oh my crazy baby, try to hold on tight. Oh my crazy baby, don't put out the light. And your hands are shaking something awful as your worries crawl around inside your clothes.

If you're stuck in a situation that's painful or there's something that makes you angry, it can enable you to step back from your own experience of it and realize that this is just a part of what it is to be human. It can allow you to accept it a little bit more and make you feel like it's less unfair.

I try to stay in gratitude as much as I can. You know, we all get to the point where we're frazzled, or tired, or frustrated, or whatever it is, but I try to take those moments and realize that I do have so much to be grateful for, and allow it to send me back to those feelings of gratitude and just live in gratitude as much as I can.

It's very reassuring and spiritual to be connected with something larger than yourself and the inside of your own head.

I have to say what I do is not easy and there are definitely moments where I feel inadequate to the tasks I've set for myself. And that's hard to feel - like you're giving your life to something and you can't really do it as well as you want to do it.

If you listen to soul music, or R&B music, or Blues music, a lot of that came from church music and spiritual music, and music has always been a really really powerful tool that people have used to get them closer to God - whatever they define God as. And for me that's always been part of what drew me to it and keeps me coming back for more.