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.

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.

And I thought, you know, a little gender confusion makes a better person. A little adversity in life at an early age. It's character building.

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.

I don't know any other lifestyle. I get up in the morning and I really do feel that the world is my oyster, and I start that way, the same as I would if I were preparing to write a song: put a blank piece of paper up on the piano and you go for it.

You can only bite off so much, so you gotta know what you want to do.

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.