So don't stop moving forward. For a while, you may feel as though you're taking two steps forward, one step back. And there may be some personal heartache along the way. But when you look your little ones in the eye, you will find your voice and take a stand for them. We are their voices. And we must have the courage to stand up for them, whatever the odds or however powerful the opposition might be.

Activists are cultural artists. They envision a world that does not yet exist, and then take action to create that world.'

Sometimes I write songs that just come out in a pop format because I grew up on melody and these amazing artists during the 80s. It's my tradition and it's something that I can't really control.

It was like the part of me that had enjoyed those friends had evaporated, leaving behind a huge, echoing emptiness, and I was scrabbling on the edge of it, trying not to fall into the hole within myself because I was terrified to find out how far down it went.

The music industry is such a huge machine. There are still a lot of good people in it, but the character of the industry and the culture of the industry is very fast.

And I realized that there's a big difference between deciding to leave and knowing where to go.

The way I figured it, keeping quiet was safe. Words could betray you if you chose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many. Jokes could be grandly miscalculated, or stories deemed boring, and I'd learned early on that my sense of humor and ideas about what sorts of things were fascinating didn't exactly overlap with my friends.