Its always my goal to raise the bar with each record I put out.

The reason I moved to Nashville was because I was reading biographies of a lot of my country music heroes, and I thought it would be better to actually go where the history was, as opposed to just reading about it.

My dad was a bass player in a Latino band when I was growing up. So we always had musical instruments in our basement.

Certain social situations make me feel like a square peg in a round hole. Realising you can connect to the human race through song makes me feel less alien.

The song "This Is Not Surreal," was inspired by a painter I love, Frida Kahlo. She really did suffer for her art. She speaks to me. She was brutally honest in her work. At that time in fine art, you really didn't see many female artists expressing that. She was such a strong female presence, and I really look up to her. She had a lot of physical pain.

There were so many different influences in my life: being half Mexican and half Irish, growing up an only child of immigrant parents, being bullied in school, feeling alienated and lonely, this undertone of darkness. All that culminated and came out in my music and made it different.

I thought that it's so sad there are people who live their entire lives lonely. They die and no one goes to their funeral. I thought about how sad that was and how so many people out there have that path. I know this sounds weird, but if I could go take their bones back to my house and appreciate them for what they are, it would be my way of taking that loneliness away.