I think I was six when I discovered the song "White Wedding" by Billy Idol, and that was the first time I thought I had discovered something on my own. It's the first song I remember hearing and liking without anyone telling me to like it.

I was listening to country at the time too, mostly because when I was a kid growing up in the country, all my friends would listen to the CMT crap and I really hated it. That would make me really angry. But when I got older I started discovering that there was actually good country music that could sort of take me back to my roots.

My guitar player calls the process of writing lyrics based on another story, "filling up the well" when you can get inspiration from other people's art without stealing, more being influenced by it.

I don't think it's something that people would ask a man. Some people make a huge deal out of the fact that I sing about drinking all the time, but I don't think of it as singing about drinking. It's singing about emotions, and sometimes that centers around drinking. To me, I'm writing about things that I'm going through that mean something to me, but some people just reduce it to: "She must drink all the time." But if a guy sings about that sort of thing, no one really looks twice.

I was kind of a little redneck growing up, living on a farm, and running around in the country. I developed hillbilly tendencies, but I wanted to listen to something a little more meaningful than "Redneck Woman" or whatever.

My idea of making time for myself is writing songs. I never stop beating myself up about trying to be productive, so I don't really like to do a lot of things other than write in my journal and write songs.

When I first started playing, I definitely had a younger scum-punk crowd, but as my music developed more and after I started playing electric guitar - you'd think it would be opposite - but a lot of people were like, "You've changed." And I have more of an older audience now.