You know, Quincy Jones was a great mentor, but he was a man in a man's world. Fortunately he's a very sensitive man and a beautiful human being, and even though he was 14 or 15 years older than me, he's a capable human being and has great communication skills.

Given that there was that era of girl group music and it's still very popular, but I think if you looked at the chart from that time you would see many more men on it. Because the industry, they were catering to young girls. I mean, that's what they thought their audience was.

I think I turned to writing really just to wake up in the morning and be a musician and to have something to do, and feel like a musician every day even if I wasn't working.

You know, the interesting thing about having traveled around the country as much as I have, and I think it's sort of inadvertently what made me come out or at least begin doing things within the community and thinking more about that, was that I get to travel quite a bit.

Don't tell me what to do, don't tell me what to say. And please, when I go out with you, don't put me on display.

Really you just gotta keep chugging along and keep a positive attitude and get through all the problems. You gotta face them, otherwise you don't get through.

Actually, the funny thing is, after all these years, I've got all these new songs to learn for the show we're doing at Joe's Pub, so it's kind of fun to get down and rehearse new things, and also rethink some of the older songs, how we're going to do them.