Ideas for songs can come from something as simple as a photograph and letting my imagination run wild on an old photograph that I found, or to a film that I have seen or to just most of the time, just daily walking through life and keeping your eyes open.

You shouldn't separate the piece from the way it's intended. I always feel like words shouldn't be unraveled from the music. They're all linked so much together.

I feel like the actual, the most beautiful thing about a song is that it is something that goes out there in the universe and people use it in the way that they need it in their lives.

I didn't know folk music growing up, no. It's something I've come to study, really, because I think there's so much to learn from traditional music in the sense of the way music began as a way of communication, the traveling storyteller, the bard, the minstrels.

Folk music was to strengthen and unify people, whether it was through an uprising and rebellion or whether is was through hard work, bringing in crops. But it was to strengthen each other and that's still what music is about today.

I never feel that I have to adopt a character. It's more the way I choose to present the music and that's always based on what is right for the song.

I didn't even know the industry of songwriting existed. I thought everybody sang songs and they were only singing the songs that they wrote. So after I found out about songwriting in college, I was like, "Okay, I want to do that."