Pain is a huge gift. It can expand you like nothing else. If you can embrace it and sink into it, you'll get to the point where you can bend and transform your experience of it. Having some sort of creative outlet to do that is another gift.

In love relationships, there's such intimacy, and the potential to be the most vulnerable and honest and raw with another person. Why can't we have that transparency with everyone in our lives and reach that higher connection?

I do have faith that something better is always coming for you.

As I grow older, what I find interesting is that I get experience with pain, different types of pain, and I start to see the lovely hilarity of life. Things that were once so crushing take on a different essence. I move through it at a faster rate. It's like traveling: it opens my eyes. My process is to allow myself to have it and to not judge myself or the situation too much, and then to create something with it.

I'm a big believer that there's a reason for everything. I'm a hopeless optimist.

It's easy for me to be vulnerable and craft songs when I'm being a hermit in my woods loft, secluded. When I get attention for it, whether it's on stage or in life - I have sort of a love-hate relationship with all of it. That makes me feel really stark naked.

Conflict is a great thing to start with. For me as a songwriter, I am constantly trying to solve problems.