I went to college in North Carolina, and that's how I learned how to play music. I learned how to play guitar when I was 12, and I was always in bands, but the first time I ever started writing my own music was being surrounded by a lot of songwriter friends in North Carolina.

With Neptune City, I could have been singing about anybody's life that grew up where I did. The town I live in it isn't that magical, but when you're growing up, you think that everything is so important.

Even with Neptune City, I feel like if you strip down all the arrangements, I feel like each of my songs is always going to be, at its core, either a country song or a blues song.

It was three breakups going on at the same time. It was breaking up with my band, and my boyfriend, and right after that, my record label. I was arguing a lot with my record label during that whole time, so maybe they all affected each other. This record, Mondo Amore, came out of a time that was really heartbreaking and confusing, and that's why I switched the sound up a lot, to make it sound a little bit grittier and more raw.

When you are going through something that heavy, for me anyway, I couldn't imagine writing about anything else. I always tend to write about what's most prevalent in my mind.

Those situations were just taking over my entire life. It was fun to write in a way, because it helped me take a really bad situation and a really sad situation and make beautiful songs out of them. When I got half of the song written it was like, "Oh, this is great." It was like the one thing that was making me happy again.

I went to college in North Carolina, and that's how I learned how to play music. I learned how to play guitar when I was 12, and I was always in bands, but the first time I ever started writing my own music was being surrounded by a lot of songwriter friends in North Carolina.